WIP: Coin Selection Page

[barefoot-88]

type: page
title: coin-selection
permalink: TBD
file: TBD

Problem

Coin selection is an integral feature of privacy in sending bitcoin payments. During bitcoin transactions, we can unknowingly expose the private data of senders, receivers, and their various wallet balances along the way. Coin selection, whether an automated or manual process, will most likely result in the breach of privacy for both you as well as your previous senders of bitcoin. However, there are various ways of mitigating how much data is exposed during each transaction. We can reduce this security risk in a few different ways, however, we are left with a design challenge.

Solution

To become aware of the trade-offs when using different coin selection strategies (manual vs automatic), as well as choosing what to optimise for (speed, cost, privacy).

Assumptions about the reader

1. Knows what a UTXO is...
2. Knows about contact creation and UTXO labelling

Result

• Click here to preview

[pavlenex]

Great work.

I reviewed your PR CoinSelection page up until Automatic Coin Selection will continue tomorrow.

General feedback is that your sentences are quite lengthy sometimes. I suggest you try to keep concise and short sentences when explaining complex terms, as it's easy to get lost to in what you were trying to tell us. I mentioned wordiness as a complaint, that usually refers to the sentence structure and means it's very easy to get lost on the point.

I also notices quite a lot of inconsistencies for the perspective. You start with I, then use we and in the end user, it would be good to be consistent here and use third-person writing.

I suggest that instead of using tons of names, you illustrate what you wanted to tell. You go quite in-depth when making an example, which can be easily presented with a graphic, text is not essential, designers are visual people 😄

One more suggestion is to look at the Private key management section. We can all learn from there on how to structure our chapters. Daniel there utalized nice structure

Best practice
Do's
Dont's
When to use
When not to use

I think you can bullet list a lots of the content. Don't forget designers are visual people. We don't need to explain, we can show.

Don't let my review discourage you in any way. Take it as a suggestion to further improve what already is a solid base. 🚀

[GBKS]

Whenever you're getting ready for review, could you please review the illustration guidelines and adjust your images accordingly? It's a brand-new page as we're just getting those contribution guidelines going, please let me know if you have questions or feedback.

[pavlenex]

Can a maintainer re-run the tests for this one? The reason tests are failing I think is too many images being compressed. Locally it works but takes quite a bit of time.

[GBKS]

@pavlenex yes, the submitted images have not been compressed. They are also way too big (pixel size), that's why it it takes so long and ends up timing out. My computer also takes forever.

Re-running tests will also fail. Better to:

• Resize images
• Delete duplicate images (e.g. funding-tx.png exists twice)
• Delete unused images (e.g. coin-selection-header.png)
• Compress images (run site locally to let the compression script run, then recommit)

Additionally, the following need to be done at some point before merging:

• Rename images and image folders to lowercase and remove spaces (e.g. Hidden Balance.png)
• Reorganize images to a single folder (currently spread across two folders)
• Add retina images
• Add mobile layout variations (most images are not legible on mobile)
• Switch to picture include for proper markup

[pavlenex]

Thanks for giving the pointers @GBKS and @barefoot-88 for quickly addressing the issue. I'll proceed with reviewing in a bit now that tests are passing.

[GBKS]

@barefoot-88 thanks for that quick update. Could you please do one more thing and put your images in a folder that matches the URL of the page? In your case, the image folder would be /assets/images/guide/payments/coin-selection/. It's much easier to maintain when images belonging to a page are all in the same folder, and folder structure mirrors URL structure.

A second thing to note is that when when the site is built, either locally or on Github, a script runs that compresses images. I'm sure you already know that, the important detail I want to get to is that this script tracks all images it has compressed in the _compress_images_cache.yml file. So even if you manually upload compressed images, the script will compress them again - unless you also manually add those image paths into _compress_images_cache.yml. If you can, it's always best to run the site locally for this reason. If you still have problems, I can upload the correct _compress_images_cache.yml before we merge this PR. Just let me know.

Thanks for bearing with me on this stuff.

[pavlenex]

Reviewed up until line 166. Will continue tomorrow.

[pavlenex]

@barefoot-88 Really awesome work. I enjoyed while reading through this one so far. I've done a few things:

1. I've resolved the conflicts that this PR had
2. I've merged the master branch into this one since it was a bit lacking behind
3. I've reviewed the PR up to line 166, but I also batch committed my suggestions. I've done this to immediately see if the formatting changes make sense and get a better feeling on how content works together before I continue to review the rest.
4. Optimized images and merged them back in.