decred / decrediton

Cross-platform GUI for Decred.
https://docs.decred.org/wallets/decrediton/decrediton-setup/
ISC License
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Locked funds due to expired/missed tickets in SPV mode #2145

Open ghost opened 5 years ago

ghost commented 5 years ago

Recently 3-4 people have come in for support with locked funds due to missed/expired tickets while using a VSP for staking. All of them were running Decrediton in SPV mode. Problem was solved by disabling the SPV mode.

I was told by @jrick that it is VSP's task to revoke these tickets so there is clearly a problem with VSP these users were using. Since we cannot control behavior of VSP, we should warn users in Decrediton that they might have to download full blockchain in case their VSP has a problem. Also missed tickets are more probable with VSP that is having issues revoking them. Currently user is not informed anywhere about this behavior and they come to know about it after the fact.

I suggest that users are either warned about this while choosing the SPV mode at startup or in setting or it can be a warning on ticket buying page if SPV mode is enabled. This can also be added to staking tutorial on decred documentation.

jrick commented 5 years ago

Another important piece of info missing from this issue is that the wallet in SPV mode will allow revoking of tickets if they are unspent and are known to be either expired or missed when they have the confirmation depth of an expired ticket. So the funds are not locked forever, but can be recovered in SPV mode by waiting ~4 months since they were bought.