Accidental overpayment of Gas fees

Core Protocol Idea
1

I think @garethtdavies spotted this a while ago and I saw another today where people have accidentally put the transfer amount into the gas fee.

Is there a way to make this impossible to do? Would be great to get a technical perspective on the feasibility / requirements.

2

I think that’s more of an issue on the frontend side of things (wallets) and not on the protocol level. It used to happen quite frequently because, if i remember correctly, a wallet few users used labeled the “fee” field “amount”, which resulted in a lot of delegations with an insanely high fee. A community member even developed this service [https://mina-massive-fees.sushivalidator.com/] for those transactions.

Perhaps wallet providers should step in and potentially add a popup or warning message when users insert unusual high fees. but I don’t think messing with the core protocol as in putting limits on fees etc to prevent those things is a smart idea

1 Like
3

Thanks for the message and feedback Trivio, great to get your expertise. I have the seen the massive fees website before and it’s a helpful tool. I can’t see anything on there that is recent, but thinking now, I vaguely remember a wallet provider saying something about this, so maybe they did create some kind of a warning pop up alert? Will contact them to check.

On Clorio it would be quite difficult to make the mistake as the fee option is pre populated, not sure about Staking Power or Auro.

I think this user transferred the funds with a command line, that’s why I thought about feasibility of changes to the core protocol. :+1:

1 Like
4

Here is the winner (unfortunately):
Block: Mina Block Explorer
Transaction: Mina Block Explorer

5

A Mina Holder did this again a few days ago, here are the details. They use Auro wallet. They lost 84 Mina.

  1. fee sent to address B62qpL4ZdJw8dmaD3DJQvKG4Ewt82va36rYK7BkkKs2SnkxzVZR5oBk. Atomi not receive
    Transaction: Mina Block Explorer

Block: Mina Block Explorer
Block Producer: Mina Block Explorer

6

Apparently the person who received the tokens by mistake (above) has returned them. :grinning: :+1: http://minaexplorer.com/wallet/B62qpL4ZdJw8dmaD3DJQvKG4Ewt82va36rYK7BkkKs2SnkxzVZR5oBk

2 Likes
7

This is mostly how it goes. Thankfully most of the pools are known there are some transactions never returned. Anyway, the reason behind this system is mostly wallet design/ui. They need to have a custom fee input option but maybe they can lock it behind advanced options, some passwords etc. The pop-up warnings are not that effective because people don’t read them most of the time.

4 Likes
8

yeah, i think there are also a lot of users for whom English isn’t their first language. Ideally it should be impossible to do by mistake.