Hi folks,
So a while ago I was doing this demonstration of accepting Bitshares using CoinGate. I created an account there and set up a gateway to accept Bitshares (which was really easy to do). I tried making the minimum payment ($5) using Bitshares
If you have read that post you'll know that it failed. The reason was that the Bitshares account I was supposed to send BTS to, did not exist.
In the above screenshot, I know I haven't entered the complete account, its just a screenshot
If you notice, when you've entered an "unknown account" the Send button greys out so you cannot send (yes, even if you've entered quantity). However, in order to make sure everything is working fine, i.e. a node is not disconnected or something, I entered my own address in "To". Yup, now the Send button got active. So I "Backspaced" and deleted my own account name and pasted the CoinGate account.
Guess what, this time Send was active. Woohoo, looks like its going to work! So I pressed send. It showed me a confirmation box, which I ignored and pressed Confirm. If I had looked at the confirm box carefully, I would have noticed that the sender address is NOT the CoinGate address. Instead, when I was backspacing / removing my own address from the sender field, apparently the last working address was "g", some lifetime premium account. So even though later I had entered the inactive CoinGate account, the Bitshares wallet was still showing me an enabled Send button.
I pressed send, and went to the CoinGate page happily waiting for it to confirm my transaction. But when it had been a while without any confirmation, I came back and saw that the money had been sent to this "g" account. I cursed myself for a minute for not reading the Confirmation box.
How to get the money back?
Now that I had sent money to the wrong person, the way to contact them is to send a small amount with a memo requesting for the money back. In the Bitshares wallet, in the Send tab, right next to the Quantity box, there is another input box "Memo"
Whatever you write here, will be sent as a message. Only you and the recepient can read this message because this is encrypted with your key. So in this case, I sent this person 0.01 BTS (I didn't send 0.00001 like some people say, because after all you're still paying a transaction fee of 0.2 BTS ;) along with a memo requesting them to send back the $5 worth of BTS.
Of course its up to them to do it or not, but till yet they don't seem to have been active
The Bitshares wallet has a great UI and of course the confirmation box shows everything that is necessary before you press Confirm. However it would be a lot better if the Send button wouldn't be active if the account in the To box is not valid. I don't know who to contact to suggest this change. If anyone knows, just let me know.
Update:
