BitcoinDesign
Pending transactions: vague time frames instead of precise number of minutes
Hello, I would like to know your opinion about a possible addition to the Activities page.
I was reading Patricia's research today and found an interesting suggestion.
As we all know, the confirmation time for an on-chain transaction can vary a lot, specially if the user decides to pay a lower fee.
At the same time, a lot of users may have an expectation of having their transactions cleared in about 10 minutes.
To avoid frustration, it may be a good idea to give a vague time frame for when the transaction should be confirmed, instead of an precise number of minutes.
An example: Instead of
- Pending - 12 minutes
Maybe it would be better to have something like
- Pending - Around half an hour
What do you think about that?
That's a good point. The "12 minutes" featured in this section is an oddly specific number.
On the one hand, if it's been 8 minutes since the last block was mined, wallet software can take an educated guess that the next block will be in 2 minutes. However, there's no certainty in that. Sometimes we randomly get blocks after only 3 minutes, and sometimes a block might take 20 minutes to arrive if there is a sudden drop in hashrate. So I think it's safer to not try and estimate these so precisely.
One convention I have seen is to use the tilde symbol.
~10 minutes
~20 minutes
Etc.
Another convention I have seen is to just use a flat "Pending".
Regardless, sees like better practice to under-promise and over-deliver. Better to prepare the user with a vague timeframe and then have funds confirms quicker than expected rather than to try and estimate it with a false degree of precision.
Addressed here https://bitcoin.design/guide/daily-spending-wallet/sending/#fees
