Clarity around fees

[mrfelton]

When doing a loop in, the fee that is presented may not be the actual fee that is paid.

In this example, the fee is quoted as 104,809 sats which seems incredibly expensive.

In reality though the on actual onchain transaction was broadcast with a fee of 0.00009517 BTC (62.4 sat/vB) - much more reasonable.

Suggest to present fee as "maximum fee" so that it's clear that this is an upper estimate and may not be the actual price.

Also, rather than only presenting the upper fee scenario could we present other (probably more likely) scenarios?

Also suggest showing the full breakdown of the fees so that it's easier to understand where the cost is going.

[jamaljsr]

Thanks for the feedback 👍

Suggest to present fee as "maximum fee" so that it's clear that this is an upper estimate and may not be the actual price.

This is a good point, and it's an easy enough fix.

Also, rather than only presenting the upper fee scenario could we present other (probably more likely) scenarios?

I'm not 100% sure I understand fully. What do you mean by more likely scenarios? Currently, when we request a quote for a loop via gRPC, loopd will return the max onchain fee (htlcPublishFeeSat) and the service fee (swapFeeSat). I'm not sure I'm following how we can display a different scenario in the UI here.

Also suggest showing the full breakdown of the fees so that it's easier to understand where the cost is going.

Yes, this is definitely something I've also wanted to add. I thought we had an issue open for this but I cannot find it at the moment.

[mrfelton]

Hey @jamaljsr My understanding is that the fee that loop provides in its quote is 100x the current onchain fee in order to cover the case where there is a sudden fee spike. But this is an exception and not the rule. In most normal cases the actual fee paid would be considerably lower than that quoted so I would say that a "more likely scenario" is one where the fee equals the current fee estimate rather than the 100x buffer case.

[jamaljsr]

Ahh, ok. I know what you mean now. Yes, the loop CLI will display both the "estimated" and the "max" on-chain sweep fee. The "max" value is 100x the "estimated". However, in the UI we only display the "estimated" on-chain fee, not the 100x one. The fee value you see in the UI is the sum of the on-chain fee + the service fee for Loop In. In the case of Loop Out, we also include the estimated off-chain routing fee in the sum.

I think displaying the breakdown would make this clearer.