Nu Client Does Not Allow Parking

There is an available rate for 0.1% for 5.7 days, but when I try to park, it says I have an estimated premium of 0.00 NBT. Why can I not park my NuBits?

How many NBT are you trying to park?

I think the UI might be bugged, perhaps the interest rate it shows does not exist. It was working fine two weeks ago when there were various, higher interest rates.

Or maybe the interest you get will be smaller than the 0.01 tx fee so the wallet does not allow it.

Well I can’t remember if this happened or not, but when NBT first released I played around with parking. I thought I put in amounts I didn’t actually have and it still showed a estimated premium, but I can’t remember for sure if that is true.

In any case, if you do that now it will show 0 estimated premium no matter what number of NBT.

I can confirm that behaviour for v0.4.4-beta on Linux and Windows.
It seems to be independent from the lock status of the wallet.

v0.4.5 on Linux still allows no parking - or I make something wrong…

what if you select a date that’s within 1 day (or on the day) of the targeted duration?

Currently there’s only a parking rate offered for 5.7 days (0.1 % p.a.).
Trying to park for 5 or 6 days leads to

Parking this amount for this duration would not provide any premium

I tried it with 1000000 NBT (not that I have that much in my wallet, lol).
I tried parking for 1 year as well.
The estimated premium always is 0.00 NuBits.
Maybe someone else can help here, as I’m off soon…

When you park the actual rate is an intermediate rate calculated from the 2 nearest rates. So if the rate for 1 year is 5% and the rate for 2 years is 7%, when you park for 1.5 year your annual rate will be 6%.

Here we have only one rate so this calculation doesn’t work and it returns zero. Actually it works if you park for exactly 8192 blocks (about 5.7 days). It’s very hard to do that with the GUI, but it works with the park RPC command because you must provide a number of blocks.

Jordan suggested we change that behavior so that if you park for 4.2 days (i.e. half way between 5.7 days and the next possible shorter duration: 2.8 days) then the actual rate would be 0.05%.

I’m wondering whether people would instead expect the rate to be flat for the entire duration: 0% from 0 to 5.7 days, 0.1% from 5.7 to 11.4 days, and 0% for any longer duration.

I wouldn’t expect that - but I wouldn’t expect anything else, because I haven’t really thought of it.
I can assume that people transfer knowledge from the fiat world to parking NuBits.
In the fiat world you often have these flat rates…

The parking rates work quite different from what the fiat banks offer.
They offer you a fixed term 30 days for 5%, any offers under the fixed term are not granted any interest. Any longer won’t pay a higher rent, unless you enter a new contract for a longer term.

I think we need to go back to why we are parking NuBits. We are not a bank and making money on lending and buying money by providing interest. In that case you want to have fixed contracts as you want to make sure the market of lending and buying has a certain balance. The bank would also keep the money in circulation.

With NuBits we are parking the money to get it out of circulation and providing a premium to do so. So a linear rate makes sense although with caps as we do want to control how long money is parked. So if 1 year is the longest duration for a premium, people shouldn’t be able to park it for 2 years for the same premium. It should just be capped at 1 year. That way we can somewhat adjust when large sums of parked NuBits will be released. The same for the bottom cap, if 30 days is the shortest duration, there shouldn’t be any premium under 30 days.

There are different models for what banks offer available. They differ from area to area and from situation to situation.
I know of models that are quite similar to the parking of NuBits: you lose control for transferring your money for a fixed amount of time and receive an interest rate for that.
That interest rate depends on the current financial situation.
If the interest rates are expected to go up, you’re welcome to choose long time frames. If they are expexted to stay low or even drop, only shorter time frames are offered; the banks want to maximize their profit.
When asking for credits it’s the other way round (in terms of interest and time frame) to let the banks maximize their profit.
Nu is not (yet?) a bank making money from lending and buying money. But firstly Nu might develop that kind of business and secondly people might see exactly that in Nu and the issued NuBits.

There are parallels between Nu and regular banks.
The organization and the voting by the NuShares holders are gladly completely different, but the mechanics are not so different after all…