I have been posting pretty regularly for the past few weeks and it's always exciting to receive rewards sats and territory revenue at the end of the day. I eagerly await midnight in Austin so I can check and see what got the most attention from stackers and how many sats I earned for the day.
It's a great feeling to stack sats every day but after a few payouts that seemed light, I noticed that I am not receiving the amount of sats that my wallet history says that I am.
I have felt like something has been wrong for a while but after yesterday's payout, my wallet history said that I received like 1500 sats but my wallet balance only went from 69.1k sats up to 69.9k sats. I'm no math professor but I know a thing or two about arithmetic. Something wasn't adding up so I decided to take a closer look and collect some data.
Sure enough. I am not receiving my rewards sats.
Since there's no total balance history after each transaction in the wallet history, the only way for me to prove anything is wrong, I had to get a video to see how my payout would behave today.
I recorded my balance increasing at midnight in Austin. My balance jumped up from 71,084 to 71,094 for about half a second and then jumped up to 72,610. That means that I earned 1,526 sats in rewards + revenue. Awesome. I love stacking sats.
Here's the video or my wallet getting paid.
However, when I opened my wallet history, it tells a completely different story.
Stacker News payment bot seems to think that it paid me a lot more than it actually did. Here's a screenshot.
It says it paid me the following sats...
1516.026 in rewards (Approximately 1404 + 111 as shown as a unique line item in my notifications) 1196.58 in ~Podcasts 48.02 in ~Movies 10.43 in ~Memes 174.86 in ~Videos
All together that totals 2945.916
...But if you watch my video, you can clearly see that I didn't receive that many sats. I only received 1,526. That's a difference of 1419 missing sats and this is not the first time this has happened.
There have been multiple payments well into the thousands of sats that I never received and there's not really a way for me to prove it without doing a complete audit of my wallet all the way back to the Genesis.
Here's multiple rewards payments that I never received.
Does anyone else seem to be having this problem?
Perhaps that brief stop at 71,094 when I was receiving my payment in my video is some sort of glitch and the bot only pays out like 10 sats for my rewards when it should be 1516.026 on a day like today.
If anyone has any ideas, please let me know as I don't want to be missing out on such substantial payments when I have millions of sats to recoup.
I know that both @k00b and @ek are busy with the launch of Cowboy credits but maybe one of you guys can find the time to look into this a little bit. That would be much appreciated.
I’m headed into the office now and I’ll sort it out first thing. Thanks for providing all the detail. It’s sometimes hard to know whether we’re communicating things poorly or there’s a bug. Rewards and revenue notifications are only made when the account balance increases for rewards/revenue and vice versa, but something could still be going on.
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339 sats \ 16 replies \ @k00b 1 Nov
Found it. Thank you so much for uncovering this!
It's an issue when owning multiple territories - it's only increasing your account balance using the revenue of one of the territories that you own (worse, the one territory that increases your account balance is nondeterministic (ie random)).1
Here's what I'm going to do before the end of the day (in addition to fixing this bug):
  1. For anyone that's owned multiple territories, I'm going to repay them ALL the revenue from ALL their territories (including repaying them for the one territory they were already paid for, meaning they'll be double paid for one territory each day they owned multiple).
  2. I'm going to reward you with a big bug bounty
We'll also add to the roadmap improvements to the audibility of account balances so that issues like this can be spotted immediately.

Footnotes

  1. For nerds, this is caused by an UPDATE ... FROM statement that increments the same row and column more than once. Each additional UPDATE of the row overwrites the previous UPDATE to it, because the first UPDATE has not been committed when the second UPDATE runs (because they're in the same statement). eg WITH operand (addend, id) as (values (1, 1000), (1, 1000), (1, 1000)) UPDATE my_table set my_sum = my_table.my_sum + operand.addend FROM operand WHERE my_table.id = operand.id will only add 1 to my_table.my_sum -- not the expected 3.
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21 sats \ 1 reply \ @ek 1 Nov
That’s one way to make territories profitable 👀
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The future is bright for SN and all of its territories.
There's nothing else in the world like it.
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Wow. Above and beyond what I was expecting to wake up to this morning.
Thanks a bunch, k00b and team. Look forward to helping grow SN and making every territory wildly profitable as we completely obsolete Reddit.
Will those payments just come through at midnight tonight?
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21 sats \ 7 replies \ @k00b 1 Nov
I'll push an update that will update your balance sometime this afternoon.
If you can reply with a 1 million sat invoice, I'll send you your bug bounty out of band.
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Looking forward to the update.
😳 That's a very generous bounty. Thanks a million.
lightning:lnbc10m1pnj2qkepp5dxqxgazm230ltduzungg0mkq05fytf0a4nz9dr75s7v0dts2hpkqcqpjsp5sfptvqzw0zy5nx8fps0f9kwwkhlzhjuyt8wle3f8fu4hqapqhkps9q7sqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqsqqqqqysgqdqsgf6kwgrzda6kuaremqz9gxqyjw5qrzjqwryaup9lh50kkranzgcdnn2fgvx390wgj5jd07rwr3vxeje0glcll6205l5hdfg5vqqqqlgqqqqqeqqjqr3e7v3qldrylr3djk5j7nnpnyu5tkug9qc23zfscvejtkwydvr5hjttfs7y6e778e7446ka6nw7aypwuurzya8yw8avafx5ee5ykulgpyqd6p6
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0 sats \ 5 replies \ @k00b 1 Nov
Do you have enough liquidity for a payment that large? I've tried twice and it's failed. It might be an intermittent issue though. I'll try again in a few minutes.
@remindme in 10 minutes
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My bad. Low liquidity and I'm receiving with Phoenix.
I just updated my channel settings.
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0 sats \ 3 replies \ @k00b 1 Nov
It failed again. I'm surprised phoenix isn't creating a channel with the payment.
@remindme in 10 minutes.
Is this bug reproducible only for stackers that run multiple territories?
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21 sats \ 3 replies \ @k00b 1 Nov
This only applies to stackers that run multiple territories. For stacker that only run one territory, this bug does not apply.
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Ok - relieved 😌
Anyway, I'll follow this thread for updates on this issue
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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b 1 Nov
If you believe there is a bug that you've experienced otherwise though, as always, lmk.
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201 sats \ 0 replies \ @ch0k1 1 Nov
Always! You can count on me on that 😜
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Congratulations brother on winning a big bug bounty!!
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Thanks.
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I haven't been keeping track with the kind of detail you have, but I do know that my daily sat stacking from SN has slowed down over the past few weeks. That might just be legitimate fluctuation, though.
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Yeah, I didn't notice anything unusual until I looked at the wallet history tab vs. my notifications.
I had some hefty stacks that I never received for some top posts and that's what made me look into this further.
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Quality post with numbers and screenshots and videos? Yea I’ll zap that! Love digging into stuff like this thank you. And good luck!
I don’t have any territories, but I get all my rewards and referral rewards and I have an attached wallet. This is part of why I want to revive the ~fitness territory tho to play with numbers like this!
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Sounds like ~fitness needs to come back to life.
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For all the talk about immortal communities, ~fitness was mortal.
But it’ll come back as ~Stacker_Fitness and with @grayruby sponsoring 25k sats! You’ve been reviving territories @Jon_Hodl, u wanna help sponsor 1 month?
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I am not taking on any additional risk until after buffalo chip cowboy credits are live but I appreciate you thinking of me.
I am not gonna set up an attached wallet for a while and see if I am able to pay for my existing territories with buffalo chips. I'm hoping they trade at a discount vs real sats.
If so, I will be looking to help other stackers launch more territories.
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Good plan
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21 sats \ 1 reply \ @siggy47 1 Nov
Another possibility, which I'm not sure applies, is that SN will dribble out sat payments to attached wallets depending on transaction costs.
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Yeah, attached wallet issues was my first thought.
Sounds like k00b found a bug.
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21 sats \ 1 reply \ @ek 1 Nov
Do you have a wallet attached to which some sats were withdrawn maybe?
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I don't currently have an attached wallet. I used to and one of the first thoughts was that funds were still being sent to my old attached wallet.
I checked that wallet and no payments received from SN since I disconnected it.
I'm looking forward to getting some buffalo chips.
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Take in consideration SN cut of 30%
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That was my very first thought a couple weeks ago when I noticed a payment was lite.
The 30% is taken out before it gets sent to your wallet so what shows in your wallet history tab should be precisely what is credited to your wallet.
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0 sats \ 2 replies \ @OT 1 Nov
I think it might be this
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That should have been applied earlier. The wallet history should be accurate to what you actually received.
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Yes.
I am getting 100% of my territory revenue and there is no 30% sybil fee on rewards payments because the rewards payments ARE the 30% sybil fees being paid out.
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21 sats \ 0 replies \ @Cotton 1 Nov
Interesting!
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I have noticed the same in the last few days but I own no territory. I thought it was a change on the fee structure (maybe in my case it is, and part of my sats go to the territory owner?).
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Yes, territory owners get a portion of all sats in their territory.
This might help you to better understand Stacker News fees.
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Ok!! Thank you, that's was what I suspected.
I had read the updates on fee structure and preserved the notion that that's what was going on, but your post made me doubt it. Thank you again :)
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Happy to help.
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