Bitcoin Forum

 

Fees    0 BTC

Should've thrown at least a satoshi in there

I did the same thing yesterday, it sucks but it will go through. Always put at least BTC0.0005 as the miner fee so there is a reason for people to confirm.

looks like small transaction fees need to part of the process if you want it done fast.

Yup, that's how bitcoin works.

How can you actually tell there was a fee included or not?

I'm having the same issue.
http://blockchain.info/fb/1hysymx

Click on the tx url

http://blockchain.info/tx/5b3cd52eba81eb5307222b067df85e57d33f8e312e71129c08b7dac1a1fd9b51

0 Fee.

Ahh, ok. I got it. I just did the same thing for mine and there is no fee. So that's what is happening. Thanks, I never knew I could look that up.

Is there anyway to add a fee to that transaction so it can be "pushed" somehow?

I don't believe so, but I'm not well versed in the super technical aspects of bitcoin.  There's not an easy way to do it.

I think that its possible for the owner of a mining 'pool' to push a transaction through, but its rough and admin type work. So what you have to do is just wait it out. It WILL come through, but sometimes even if you add a mining fee the transaction gets "stripped" of its fee because of some bug or another random happenstance. Ehh, such is life.

In the mean time wondering what time means.

Wow.  I feel lucky.  I had one outgoing from mtgox today that say for about 10 hours.  It just went through.

I had to wait about 6 or 7 hours. The service I used to buy the bitcoin got a hold of the mining pool that had the transaction and somehow was able to get the transaction confirmed. I'm curious as to how you can tell which mining pool has the transaction. In the end, it worked out ok and I only had to wait a little bit.

I don't get why everyone seems to have so much trouble with this.  I sent less than 0.5 BTC with no fee and it confirmed on the next block.  I guess "aged" wallets without a lot of dust transactions have a lot higher priority and don't need a fee.

Since when are fees required? Well not required, but since when is it customary to send. I thought transactions were free under two conditions (size limit and a minimum amount; they're somewhere on the bitcoin.it wiki). You earn $3500 for a single block, why do we need to charge fees now?

And I also wonder how miners set this. Miner clients (or pool software) just has a configurable setting for the minimum fee or so?

If there are 4,000 unconfirmed transactions, and you can fit 800 transactions in the block you are working on, which 800 do you choose?  Only seems fair to give priority to those who voluntarily paid a transaction fee.  The rest can wait.

A fee is not required, However it is highly recommended if you want your transaction to be dealt with soon. For example, if you ran a business and some people donated and some didn't. Who would you help first? Maybe you would help the person who went first, but Bitcoin has many transactions a day. Putting a small fee increases the likely hood of it getting 'dealt' with sooner rather than later.

You can fit only 800 transactions in one block? Is this because of the 0.7 bug (with the too big block that caused two chains)?


I thought you could just process all unconfirmed transactions at once; put them all in one block.

How many transactions you can fit in a block depends on the size of the transactions that you choose.  Right now bitcoin is coded to only accept blocks that are less than 1 megabyte in size, furthermore most miners are self limiting to something smaller (I can't remember if it is 256 kB or 500 kB?).  The 1 mega byte limit has existed for a long time, and there hasn't yet been any change to that in any recent release of the client.

Okay, that explains a lot. I guess the limit is in place for ratelimiting purposes, so that a huge block couldn't overload the network (miners and clients) with lots of data? Or so that the block is uploaded and propagated faster, and they have a bigger chance of getting the block reward?

Those are two of the more important reasons that there is a lot of support for a fixed size block.  In addition it creates an incentive for users to include transaction fees in their transactions so the network can transition to being supported by fees rather than the inflationary costs of creating new bitcoins.

Ok, thanks for all the answers! :)