Confirmed VS Unconfirmed Feedback

I think in the past feedback became confirmed when partners had traded a total of 1 XMR and then this was changed later to the equivalent of 100 USD? (which makes sense as it’s a more stable currency and therefore more meaningful). I’m not sure when that change took place but I noticed one of my confirmed feedbacks disappeared a while ago, which got me thinking - was it because it was over 1 XMR but under 100 USD at the time of the change, or was it because the system only tracks the traded volume in XMR and the price of XMR dropped?

In other words, does the system base what is confirmed-feedback on the amount traded in USD-equivalent at the actual time of the trade or just takes the total XMR traded between partners and converts it to USD at whatever the exchange rate happens to be at the time?

I hope that made sense. I’m a little tired writing this at the moment. :slight_smile:

or was it because the system only tracks the traded volume in XMR and the price of XMR dropped?

This is correct. We can’t use the value of the XMR based on the trade per XMR price at that time since that would allow a user to created an ad where 1 XMR = $1000000 USD and trade with himself to give himself good feedback.

Hi there. I thought about that same problem shortly after I made the post. Could you perhaps use the ‘consensus’ exchange rate for tallying purposes?

So say a trade is made for 1 XMR and that is considered by the major exchanges to be worth $100 USD and you record that as $100USD? So you’d basically be recording the ‘real’ price of the XMR that changed hands at that time instead of converting later when the exchange rate may have changed drastically. For the purpose of feedback, the amount of value that changed hands at the time is more relevant than how much it’s worth if the price of XMR drops.

That creates another problem, we’ll have to keep a record of the historical price of XMR and constantly query it. There will be trade-offs either in performance, or storage, or both.

I wouldn’t worry too much about this, though, since it affects all traders in an equal manner. Besides, the price will surely go up soon :wink:

I was just thinking you’d query the value of the XMR (in USD) at the time of the trade. Historical prices don’t matter, only what USD-equivalent in XMR was traded at the time. If by consensus the exchange rate at time of trade was 1 XMR = 100USD then that trade is counted as 100USD for the purposes of value traded.

Edit: So in other words, you’d store XMR traded as well as its USD-equivalent (based on the exchange rate at the times of those trades). I think this would just lead to a better determination of what feedback should be considered as being confirmed.

Edit2: Yes, if the price goes up this is a non-issue. Let’s all hope it does, hehe!

I was just thinking you’d query the value of the XMR (in USD) at the time of the trade.

Again, this will cause either processing or storage trade-offs. Because all traders are affected by this equally, it doesn’t seem necessary for us to make these kind of trade-offs.

Yeah, it’s not really a big deal and come to think of it you would have to go back and check the historical prices to populate the database with the USD values up to this point. After that, storage/processing requirements -should- be minimal though.

Most traders probably wouldn’t be affected much but as a (somewhat contrived!) example, you could have a trader make 10 trades each worth 100USD and another trader make 5 trades each worth 200USD. The former will initially have twice as many confirmed feedbacks as the latter, but if the price of XMR drops a bit, then the former trader has none while the latter retains all 5, despite them having traded the same value overall.

I appreciate that the system works okay at the moment, even if it’s not perfect (and I can imagine there are other more serious problems with people gaming it anyway which are harder to solve) but I just thought I’d put the suggestion out there. Thanks for taking the time to reply, alex. :slight_smile:

Edit: Just to clarify one thing, you probably wouldn’t actually store the historical XMR->USD prices, you’d just get the exchange rate say once a day and then store the USD amount as part of the transaction data so it’d just be a quick conversion and an extra database field for the USD value.

That’s alright, but in any case, if there is enough demand for this change, we’ll have to implement it, since the demand makes the trade-off worth it.

@Vallus just wanted to let you know that we’ve updated the feedback system such that if a feedback was once confirmed it stays that way forever.