Bitcoin Forum

http://www.coindesk.com/new-service-finds-optimum-bitcoin-transaction-fee/

"Network competition

As the number of bitcoin transactions rise, competition for space in each block is heating up. Miners prioritise transactions with the highest fees, working down the list until the block reaches its limit, 750,000 bytes.

Transactions that don't make the cut remain in the miner's 'memory pool', a kind of bitcoin limbo. They may be included in future blocks depending on their priority or fee.

Currently, you can opt out of the fee altogether. However, there has been debate as to whether this should be raised, with a recent pull request to make a 10,000 satoshi minimum to reduce spam on the network.

CoinTape indicates that avoiding a fee is more likely to result in delays to your payment. It could take up to six blocks, or around one hour (blocks are created roughly every 10 minutes)."

A lot of people feel this is only a push attempt from miners to increase the miners rewards before the halving comes into affect and the bitcoin rewards decrease. They want the increased transactions cost to fill

the gap, and to retain their current income. From a miners perspective this is not really unfair, because they have to work on small margins to stay profitable, but the downside of that is the cost to the

consumers. One of Bitcoins advantage over other competitors is the low transaction fee's... if we bend the knee to this, we could loose this advantage in the future.

The alternative could be to switch to 3rd party payment services that operate off-chain, like Xapo.  ??? ???

This CoinTape chart is quite useful. Although the data is presented in a confusing way, it shows how much fee each unconfirmed transaction has and how many block's delay would you expect if you pay a different rate.

http://i59.tinypic.com/258s7yw.png

Recently I have a habit of glancing the mempool before I create a transaction (due to the stress tests), so I know how much delay I am expecting. The mempool page at blockchain.info gives the number of unconfirmed transactions but not a breakdown of the fees. The CoinTape page gives fee distribution and delay estimates. I believe the estimates are a tad optimistic, still useful as a reference.

Recommend everyone to take a look: http://www.cointape.com

Wow,that is a really useful service
has someone already tried it?

The optimum fee is 0 when you only spend inputs that qualify for 0-fee.

Cool website. The only problem for me is that i don't have a clue how many kb my transactions have. Electrum doesn't show such a info. Or is there a rule of thumb to get that value?

Finding the optimum bitcoin transaction fee will not be very important to single use users who can adjust it when they want, but it certainty has applications and utility for companies with larger use of crypto, that said some clients autoadjust based on estimated costs so not sure if the service is going to grow to quickly at this time but their is potential for it.

That said not really in favor of forcing a minimum fee we have issues with blockchain size but the principle of low cost transactions and zero text sums is a very useful function of Bitcoin.

Yes it was the time of network stress testing and also after that there were many spam attacks.
There was also a warning sign on bitcointalk about the minimum no. of confirmation for a successful and secured payment.