Thank you for your lazinETH
About a year ago, I wrote a blog post called “A SmartContract best practice: Push, Pull, or Give?” explaining why you need to call the contract explicitly when you withdraw your funds, for security and gas cost.
The current solution is to have a cooling period(default to one week) and the contract owner can take any remaining deposit. For those of people who haven’t withdrawn, we always remind people via twitter yet there are on average about 10% of people who don’t take their deposit out.
After the ENS hackathon in August, I sent an email to all the participants who haven’t withdrawn to give different choices.
After sending the emails, 2~3 people withdrew their deposit immediately (without responding back to me), 1 person choose to donate all to the charity, 1 person expressed to donate half to the charity while the other half to the organiser (ENS), and 1 person who neither withdrew nor responded back to us.
For the latest ETHBerlin events, almost 50% of people did not withdrawn their deposits, which may be another sign that the deposit was too low.
For ETHBerlin, we asked the organiser Maria Paula Fernández (aka MP) about what she wants us to do with the leftover deposit and MP kindly asked us to donate to the fellowship of ETHMagicians. When we reminded to the participants, one participant agree to donate to it while one participant asked to donate to the operator (us).
Here is the break down of all the ETH we donated to different organisations.
- ETH 0.16 of ETHBerlin day 1 at Mitte was donated to EthMagicians.
- ETH 0.16 of ETHBerlin day 1 at Factory Görlitzer Park was donated to EthMagicians.
- ETH 0.059 of ENSHackathon was donated to ENS
- ETH 0.0397 of ENSHackathon was donated to WorldBuilders (it was sent to heifer.org who sends to WorldBuilders on their behalf. This is a charity of choice by Nick Johnson and famously known for him donating the proceed from Cryptokitties bug cat)
In total ETH 0.4187 out of the total deposit of ETH 1.44 (which is close to 30%) was donated for the greater good. About 10% of the left-over deposit was taken as admin fee for us to send transactions. We also kept ETH 0.02 to ourselves as @Philiff wished.
You may say “You are taking advantage of the user’s laziness and the horrible UX of your Dapp”.
TheDAO contract had more than four million USD worth of token still left. That was mainly due to the complex UX of the withdrawing as well as the lack of means to notify the victims. In our case, withdrawing is even easier than RSVPing so it is purely the fact that users forget, care less about the deposit, or an opportunity to leave some tip to say “thank you”.
We are aware that this is a bit of a controversial feature. It can flourish the culture of “Thank you economy” while it may turn operator (us) or organisers into “greedy” by clearing out the deposit so soon (though each participant has enough time to withdraw).
We are also aware that the simplest solution is for the operator (us) to send back the deposit on behalf of the participants (after taking some admin fee to cover the gas cost) or just leave them forever but we are keen to experiment this area. We will try out different options before coding logics into smart contracts. Any feedback to critique or suggest different options will be welcome.
For the time being, I would like to thank @Ryan_cle, @Hevalon, Nik Page , Ivo Georgiev (ENS hackathon participants), @altworowsky and @Philiff (ETHBerlin participants) for expressing your intention to donate and others for your laziness (or probably you were too shy to say it in public. I knew it!).
