Bitcoin Forum

given the current rise in the BTC exchange rate, the BTC transaction fees MUST be reduced NOW!

JFC!  :-[ :-\ ???

I ask again: why? If you want to spam the network, you're going to have to pay a fee. Rightly so.

well what folks pay now is not a fee, it is a f***** rip-off

Feel free to use a client where you can set your fee as low as you want.

And after you did that ... go outside and harass some bees.

I have to disagree (though I don't like paying fees as much as the next guy)  the issue is the miners need to get paid.  These are the same guys bidding 30,000 dollars on Ebay for 1200 mining machine because they are factoring in fees for paying that massive markup.

As community grows, the fee will grow, so it's the only regulative at the moment to stop people from filling up the blockchain for no reason. And 7 US cents - is that really much ? Banks charge a lot more!

thats bs

you can easliy have free bank accounts in europe.

transactions are free over here if you want

It's still dirt cheap compared to credit card or paypal processing (something like mandatory $0.25 + 2% or more). Miners have to be paid with fees pretty soon, after the next halving, the mining reward from fees will be very important to keep miners on board.

Let me know if you find an internet currency with less fees than bitcoin.

I don't really think I've paid any fees of late, even when I send around 10 transactions per day of varying sums.

Just let your coins age..  I do and don't get asked to pay a fee 99% of the time and the coins move without delays.

But yes its getting as bad as normal banks fee now.

The fee system is in place to stop spam. For instance SDice takes up around 80% of the network with "0.00000001" type transactions. Its part of the security system. Lowering the
fees would also push out large numbers of Full Nodes. I read some were we are down to 10k and that number is dropping each day. If Fees drop any more Full nodes will be forced to censor and refuse all small transactions that don't have a fee.

pretty soon as in 2140?

I would say: yes reduce them. Prize has trippeled over the last month, on a similar level, Transaction fees should be lowered to 1/3 of the original value so the worth of the transaction fee stays the same. Miners will still get paid an equal amount in value so i don't see why that is an argument to not do it. similarly, if we reduce the transaction fee according to bitcoins worth, spam protection will stay the same, as the serious spammer will still have to invest the same amount of value to spam.

By not reducing the minimum fee we are slowly taking away one of the advantages of bitcoin.

the idea of satoshi dice is actually in my mind testing/showing the system as it will be used in a few years time when a bitcoin is thousands of dollars each, millions of people will be trading only satoshi's between each other.

so instead of putting in fee's which add up now to WELL over a few cents/pennies. the extremely well paid bitcoin foundation should use the satoshi dice as an example of the future transaction styles that will happen. and make bitcoin cope with it.

instead of trying to evade and avoid dealing with small transactions.

a couple years ago bitcoin was shown to be a free market where transactions are virtually free and you can send any amount in seconds.

but now

costs are 5cents or by avoiding fee's a single confirms can take alot longer then 10 minutes.(hours in cases) and may not even get accepted if its only a few cents order. so there goes any chance of me wanting to buy a pack of chewing gum without waiting using bitcoin

so like the OP say's sort out bitcoin to cope with small transaction spam as its not spam, is just an example of the future transaction sizes and quantity.. because once not just the niche market of crypto/drug/programmers/libitarians really start to use bitcoin but also the mainstream population then you will see many many many more satoshi (under 1btc) transactions happening.

so use satoshi as an insight to the future.. not as something to ignore..

and also

REDUCE THE FEE

ftfy.

I quote myself :

until they decide to hair cut your account

No, pretty soon as in next halving. 1800 BTC per day production isn't going to keep enough miners interested, but the fees will. if you want security, you pay the fee. Better security increases the value of your own BTC.

I would say: yes reduce them. Prize has trippeled over the last month, on a similar level, Transaction fees should be lowered to 1/3 of the original value so the worth of the transaction fee stays the same.

+1 exactly it should be proportional. reg

another f****** rip-off is the 1 € = 1 U$D fee  to be "allowed" to edit the btc-wiki  >:( >:(


you shameless greedy sheisters ! >:( >:(


you shameless greedy sheisters !

Guys ? A transaction fee in the bitcoin case , means the minimal amount required to get included in the block. Additionally a Miner can reject to mine a block if he thinks there is not enough fees paid.

So , and if you are not included in the block or your transaction is in a block with low fees your transaction may in the worst case never be validated.

However at the moment there are no miners rejecting anything. But this will change in the near future.  Miners will set a price. And that is how it always was intended.

The values in the satoshi client are only a guidance ( and its quite small), so get over it and pay your miners for securing the network.

ppl who run bitcoin foundation are carpetbaggers

What does the bitcoin foundation have to do with all this?

ITT OP rages about things he doesn't understand

Why would 1800 BTC/day at some future valuation not be interesting for miners when 3600 BTC at $15-$150 is, as was 7200 BTC at $0-$31?

No one is forcing anyone to make huge capital investments - it's healthy competition which clearly finds the current production rate attractive.

Look here

One way to lower the fees is to become a miner yourself.
Then you can set to accept no-fee transactions and create blocks that are several megabytes big if you like.

Do you all realise that by not lowering the fee so its USD value stays roughly the same you are saying "raise fees to stop small transactions"? Because that is exactly what is happening.

Rather we should have solid rules in place to stop transactions that negatively impact the blockchain.

15$  per BTC = 0.0075 USD fee
150$ per BTC = 0.075  USD fee
500$ per BTC = .25     USD fee (Same as dwolla except we dont allow small transactions for free)

But by your guys logic raising the fee in USD helps the network, so why dont we raise it further rather then lowering it. lets move it up to 1$ for every transaction, that way we can push out many other small transcations and at the same time have higher fees then dwolla and paypal, it will be a strike of genius! everyone will flock to bitcoin for its higher fees!

But how do you plan to convince people to use bitcoin when bitcoins fees are nearly as high as dwollas *right now* and fees to get bitcoins are even higher? We may care about how bitcoin is better then dwolla and paypal, but try convincing the public that they should trust bitcoin and enjoy the ever increasing fees at the same time.

Soo you expect admins and contributors to work for free  ? What about hosting costs, costs for the admin and so on ? There's no rule that you cannot ask for a donation or take paid for services you provide. Also paying ensures that the quality of contributions are higher. It will deterr the average spammer from registering. If one is unhappy about this, one is free to start a free wiki on your own terms.

Welcome to the bitconomy. Adapt yoself before yo wreck yoself.

Im fairly sure hes just frustrated by the apparent inability of people to come up with an opposing opinion while addressing his concerns.

Do you understand that except for some very special circumstances the fee is not required? Like I said, if you are spamming a network you will have to pay a fee, that keeps the network secure. Of course, if you do not add a fee, you might have to wait a ridiculous amount of time before your transaction confirms, but that's entirely up to the miners.

Like John, I, too, have not paid a fee for a transaction in a very, very long time.

If bitcoin is to become mainstream it needs to be able to work with small transactions. If the value of bitcoin increases and the fee remains the same, smaller transactions will stop being plausible and bitcoin loses a big portion of its userbase.

I agree that the fee should be reduced if bitcoin keeps appreciating in value.

im not crazy familiar with the metric that decides on fees and i dont know of any type of calculator that lets you guess at costs though id love to see one! but unless that metric includes a BTC to USD value conversion in it, the metric will increase in value as the BTC price increases.

What i mean is, *As an example* someone used 100BTC that was 1 day old to sweep up some small transactions with no fee. when it was 15$ each that was 1,500$ in BTC, now that its 150$ each thats 15,000$ in BTC, as a result the barrier for "free" transactions is higher then it used to be because the USD value went up even if the BTC amount stayed the same.  *this is not meant to say you need 100 BTC for a free transaction, its just illustrating a point with a example i found on the forum.*

I see your point, but you do realize you can't incorporate the price in such a calculation without having the whole market contained inside the protocol? In any case, spammers should be punished, and I don't mind if they're punished a little bit more as the value of bitcoin rises. Just don't be a spammer and you're good.

I do however think that the "spamming threshold" could (should) be lower than 0.01 btc at this point. This threshold is the real problem in my opinion, not the minimum fee itself.

Unfortunately some people don't want regular people to be able to use Bitcoin, so this is a desired outcome for them.

Given the current price, yes, the default fee should be lowered  :D Of course everyone can change it manually on the client  ;)

You must not be a miner....the dust ,heat, constant attention, breakdowns, list goes on and on.

and you complain for .001 = 13 cents. Todays price @ $127

You try wiring money for that amount.

Go home.

Who, exactly, is this request directed to?

There are ways to not pay fees. Check the board.

I usually do not pay fees. But I only send coins every once in a while.

What are you spending on that costs such huge fees?

Where I live bank transfers have 0 fees. Anyway you shouldn't be comparing it to transferring money, if you want bitcoin to be mainstream it has to be practical for both large and small transactions, as the value in bitcoin gets higher so does the fee and small transactions are impossible

raise the fees

Most clients besides QT let you decide what fees you'd like to pay. I pay 0.0001-0.0002 for most transactions, which is plenty for now, a bit over 1 cent at current exchange rates. Perhaps the QT client should lower the "hardcoded" fee amount a bit, considering it was set back when BTC was worth <$20.

The official bitcoin-qt binaries say:

Fee 0.01 recommended.

https://i.imgur.com/gCL8BPF.png

Using another client and setting a low fee does not solve the problem of large fees since they introduce other problems. Longer transaction times, transactions that wont be relayed by the ordinary bitcoin clients (make sure you connect to Eligius since they accept low-fee transactions), and i bet i am missing some problems.

Now why are the transactions fees a problem? My 0.001BTC:
- I be leave in an world (internet) full of microtransactions, where we pay small amounts, maybe one dollar for an app, maybe 10 cent to hear a song.
  I thought Bitcoin was the solution to this problem, with the set transaction fee's, it is not.

- as the value of bitcoins increase so does the transaction fee's. One BTC is worth 40 times more now than a it was about half a year to a year ago. Which means that the transaction fee's have increased by 40 times but the prices of the "goods" have decresed.

- The miners need the transaction fee argument is crap! a handful of computers could handle all transactions in the world if the difficulty were low enough. And if that was the case they would probably make good money too. Mining is a free market, and saying that we should keep transaction fees so some ppl can spend thousands of BTC on hardware is in my opinion a bad thing.

* My transaction fees are going into the pockets of BFL and Avalon when in all honesty the mining could have been done with a couple of cpu's.

  The argument that "We the bitcoiners" should pay money to miners so they can spend it on hardware when much cheaper equipment would suffice is just ignorant.

//GoK

No you cant since the official clients dont relay all transactions, depending on fee and size settings.

So at $1000/btc is it worth reducing the fees?

How about $10,000/btc?

At some point, this needs to become a discussion. When is it?

http://qubic.boards.net/index.cgi?board=theconcept&action=display&thread=1
Scroll to "What features Qubic has"

It's in a prototype now.

that discussion is also underway in the github source repo

but there is strong resistance in just changing 1 lil digit in the source code.


THIS IS POLITICAL!

I like this chart on blockchain.info:

https://blockchain.info/charts/transaction-fees-usd

That graph doesn't mean anything unless you compare it to the number of transactions.

Why don't you produce a graph of average cost per transaction?

What is this USD you speak of?

higher fees are necessary, sooner or later. bitcoin will not be the best tool for online micro transactions, hence don't use it for it.

Valid point. This nonsense thread should be deleted.

US Dollars from U$A

This is a pathetic argument because depending on the value of a BTC, these "micro transactions" you talk off might be quite valuable. At which point you won't be able to spend your BTC because the fees are so high.

Oh c'mon, things to do
1)reduce the DEFAULT fee in the client. It was set when price was 10$, not 100. Today the default fee is too high, but most people don't know that and don't change that.
2)increase blocksize, so we aren't stuck at 7 transactions per second or less. Moar transactions per block means moar profit for the miners even with lower transactions

Said that, transactions are required to pay the miners for their work! Eventually miner will be paid only with transactions, no more by generating new bitcoins. So, stop whining and start paying fees for your transaction! Of course not exagerated fees!  

Indeed, lowering the default fee at these prices must be done. Increasing the max blocksize in some fashion must be done also. The default fee is a smaller change though and can be done faster.

I feel like pushing the ignore button for some of these people who have these delusions of actually opposing these quite critical and obvious changes.

I agree. Micropayments get less fun, if you want to send $0,05  = 0,0004BTC and you have to pay more fees than 5Cent...

fees should be constant invarible to exchange rate of BTC


roughly constant in say € or $ of course

How are u going to set fees when USD and EUR disappear?

that's a technicality.

I'll be glad to answer you in time, though!   ;D ;D ;D

Then our great-great-grandchildren can solve that problem when it comes up 127 years from now. The initial recommended fee structure was an arbitrary number defined when a few people held all the coins and traded very little. That day has passed.

99% of the total bitcoins are mined in like 30 years. So it is a problem for us  :D

Fair enough.

Regardless, someday soon perhaps *none* of us will be mining. Don't think Visa, Western Union, or PayPal are sitting on their hands watching miners take 'their' money.

An entire warehouse of ASICs would be rather trivial for Visa.

Hey look, if miners want an arms race fine, but why should i have to pay extra for that?
At the moment bitcoin is becoming uninteresting as a currency at a rate faster than you can say 'obsolete'.

Exactly.

I wish people wouldn't be so reluctant to change within the Bitcoin code. The idea that the structure set out by Satoshi in the beginning is perfect is complete bullshit.

It is inevitable that fees must be reduced and it's inevitable that other changes will also have to take place if Bitcoin is to grow.

Why ? I try send today 0.01(don't have much more ) bitcoin to armory developer and was not able because minimum fee was 0.0005 and this is rip off.

No, it's just the truth -- sorry that you might have been disillusioned. There is limited space (google "tragedy of the commons"), and this space is not arbitrarily inflatable. You should rather think the other way around and only use the current bitcoin network for large transactions.

A possible future vision is a situation, where several specific altchains (or other payment providers) provide cheaper services with their own unique branding and use the current larger and established bitcoin network as their common clearing house.

It just happened  10 minut ago, I was not able send 0.01 bitcoin to armory dev due 0.0005 fee...

Definitively time to reduce the default fees.
(For some reason I can't even send from blockchain.info for less than 0.0005, even with custom transaction.)

The minimum fees in place have nothing to do with paying the miners: it's an anti-spam security.
Even a fraction of a cent is sufficient to prevent that.

*Eventually* fees will be (if everything go according to plan) a way to pay for the miners.
Yet the situation is still being discussed: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=157141.0 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=157141.0).
Until we reach the current block limit, fees are purely an anti-spam policy.

Bitcoin has to be able to do it all without an altcoin otherwise that means it cant scale and wont succeed. One of bitcoins biggest rallying points is that it has low to non existent fees. everything you suggest leads to "well lets just pack it in and quit, this project is flawed" Thankfully its not, you just dont understand that it can scale to handle all transactions. the fee is a anti spam filter, its throttle is the fact those bitcoins cost money. even at 1 penny per transaction, in time when the number of transactions increase, the amount of money per block will go up. dont forget that the profit from mining remains roughly the same regardless of the money from blocks. as the amount from blocks goes down, miners quit. as the amount from blocks go up, more join. while its a nice idea to put more money in blocks so there is more going to miners so more miners mine... there has to be a limit to it. the money has to come from somewhere and raising fees to do it at the expense of bitcoin itself will simply make it less attractive to new users. "Use bitcoin! the fees are higher then paypal and dwolla!" will not get people to use it. we have to keep fees low to keep it attractive.

I just sent $400 by Western Union to China. It cost me $25.
I could send that same $400 by Bitcoin to China for $.07.

Clearly, the fees are far too low.

Bitcoin.org says:

Cheap micro payments

Bitcoin offers the lowest payment processing fees for any type of transaction, including micro-payments. Which means that it can also be used to design and implement new creative online services that could not exist before only because of financial limitations.

http://bitcoin.org/en/bitcoin-for-developers

In practice this is not true right now. Some transactions are far too expensive. For these purposes, Bitcoin is broken. It sounds like it should be trivial to fix, but some people actually seem to be suggesting it shouldn't be fixed.

It would be helpful if we could get some consensus on whether cheap transactions are actually a goal or not. If they're not, people who don't think we should be prompting people to pay multiple-digits of US cents to move a tiny bit of information from one place to another can start working on another solution.

Yep.

Thats such a load of bull. it was suited for it just fine when the USD value of bitcoins were lower.

Dont a few of the devs control that website, previously satoshi himself(?) im willing to bet they didnt type that up by accident.



(general post)
When dealing with bitcoin people have this tendency to think they fully understand something when they dont and they go on to claim X, Y and Z. its most common and easy to spot in random comments on other websites, im sure everyone has come across pro bitcoin comments that are wrong on several levels. its not that its done on purpose, they just think they understand how it works when they dont.

This issue with fees seems to be one of those issues that people seem to not understand due in part to some subtlety in understanding what blockchain spam really is, and what it is not. as well as not understanding how fees affect miners and how those fees will eventually replace the block reward. not to mention how pruning will help with the blockchain size when its implemented.

Id like to also note, that while i agree this should be left to 'the people' to decide. There is a problem with that. if the people dont fully understand what they are voting for and make a bad decision based on bad information then its not helping anyone. in cases like this id hope that the devs at the top that understand the situation and problem make the smart decision and simply make the fees 100% adjustable client side. while this wont force miners to change their settings it would certainly set up the network where people could send what they want and the miners would be able to choose their own threshold for fees. instead its currently dictated to them by a network that makes it impossible for people to choose what fee they want to send even if it wont be accepted currently(this can change!).

as i said before the satoshi dice is showing everyone an example of the future. where most transactions will be done in satoshi's due to bitcoin value being many hundreds of dollars each.

allowing fee's to be high to block/ignore satoshi dice transactions is not a good thing now or for the future of bitcoin. It's just a lazy and ignorant way to avoid thinking about the future of bitcoin, purely for selfish and personal profit of miners today.

think of the future. develop the clients/miners to accept satoshi payments easier without causing the network to struggle.

i want to ensure that in a couple years i can buy chewing gum at walmart for under a dollar (when valued as only a couple satoshi's) without having a 3 hour confirm time or a $1 fee due to miners ignorance/selfish profiteering. think of the community and the future, think outside of the box known as your own pocket.

use satoshi dice as a test bed of how transactions will be in the future. not as something to be ignored by overpricing the fee's in the hope satoshi dice will die.

Start sending 0.00005 fees now (that is 0.00696 USD).
If too many people start doing this miners will start accepting this fee as a standar.

I actually sent you a tip, but it was eaten by the fee  ;)

The default fee in Electrum was reduced recently.
It is now 0.0002 btc/kilobyte
Note that the user may also set it manually.

that's the ADDITIONAL fee

what do you mean?

in bitcoin clients you can set an ADDITIONAL fee to pay.

if you set it to zero, you still must pay transaction fees.

unless you use a modified client or sth.

I use the modified client below to send and receive payments all the time with absolutely no fee.  ;D

 No Fee Client (TOR users beware/client should not be used by drug addicts or illegal porn collectors)  (https://payments.amazon.com/sdui/sdui/personal/webpay/faq#wpFee)

So what you really want is a sort of "jail-broken" version of the Satoshi client without all the locked-down crap that the non-open-source-believing developers are too scared for you to touch? ;D

no.

I want ca. 30% of the network supporting  "bitcoin free transaction relay policy"

that may be slightly slower, but still work fine.

well in 2012 a fee of 0.0005 BTC was quite acceptable

Moving a miniscule bit of data from one column to another should be so cheap that it may as well be free for most practical purposes. You'd have to cock your decentralized payment system up unbelievably badly to need to charge anything like what most of the conventional online payment systems do.

If we're going to make Bitcoin expensive it'll be a matter of time until someone does it properly and takes most of the transaction business. Good luck maintaining the value of your electronic gold when that happens.

I have already done it, start lowering your fees and pools will start accepting this transactions.

that is basically the way to go

Today on a $1.49 order from my store, the customer could be paying a 7 cent fee.  This is a FAR better deal then Paypal or Dwolla but as fees have not changed it is now a real percentage of the order cost.  

NOTHING in wide use in the real world competes with Bitcoin but here there is an impediment to micro-transactions.  Is that important for Bitcoin?  Do we want to ration space or cast a wider net and find new applications?  These are issues that need to be decided.  

I would like to see a smaller fee for smaller transactions with coins older then a month but right now all anyone has to do is use a client that allows no fees and wait for it.  Unless the coins are really new should move.  

There is no good reason for fees in the long run. Sure, a x10 bigger currency needs x10 security so halfing the block reward is counter-productive but still we will be out of reach of any attacker soon and that's the only purpose of mining after all. If that's paid for, any further fees just slow down business in the bitcoin economy.

(I vote for proof of stake and no mandatory fees never ever. May the miners decide how to fill their 1MB or 10MB per block later on based on coin age and - yes - fees.)

Every fee you pay is completely optional.  If I am determined for a transaction to go through in a timely manner, I will pay the recommended .0005btc fee, but otherwise, I'm not paying anything.

that's wrong. fees are coded into bitcoin.

That's true if you don't care about security. But if you want that miniscule bit of data to be secure, there is a real cost to achieving that security.

The question is, is the cost of securing a transaction realy that high.