Bitcoin Forum

Hi,

I have tried to send 10m BTC to a friend 1:30 ago and it has not been confirmed yet! When I check Blockchain.info, the transaction is not there yet and I see hundreds of transactions per minute appearing there. Considering that miners will choose highest fee transactions first, low amount transactions will starve for confirmation... I have chosen the fee recommended  by the satoshi client and it says that it is probable to be confirmed in the next 25 blocks (250 minutes!). It seems that there is bid of fees and high amount transactions are more keen to pay a higher fee. Therefore, I believe that that speech of no transaction cost with bitcoin has become a fairy tale...


Status: 0/unconfirmed, in memory pool, broadcast through 7 node(s)

Date: 20/12/2016 16:01
To: Murillo 1Bf1gRLpshMxEZXH6Xw6FVRWX6Zcz8BJi4
Debit: -0.01000000 BTC
Transaction fee: -0.00009840 BTC
Net amount: -0.01009840 BTC
Transaction ID: 3493f7390da8e225a44ded54c413f6c0ced3ec3d566b89c0b3e463928f4ca1aa
Output index: 0

in my country, i can send 0,03 euros (0,04 mBTC) with 0,06 euros (0,12 mBTC in normal priority and 0,05 mBTC with LOW priority) of fees (with my phone = android bitcoin wallet schildbach).

so, yes, you can always emit small transactions (and pay somes article in website for example).

you can send any amount. as long as the fee is good enough.

EG
send a penny but it will cost you 7c-20c+

at the moment third world countries like the idea of bitcoin but find the fee's the main gripe. in some countries its more than an hours wage just for the fee.

the problem is that many devs are american and small minded about the world so while they say that 7cents is cheap for a fee they are not thinking of the unbanked world.
Even their future side service LN which they want to be the future of bitcoin does not consider third world countries as it will require depositing a minimum amount to cover a certain timeframe.
one example being $4.70~ (0.006btc) just to use LN to cover the possible fee's for a 10 day channel

as for paying the recommended fee.. everyone pays that. which means you are paying no better than everyone else. and knowing every ~10 minutes there are 2000-2500 average people all paying the same. everyone is left waiting.

it is very much a bidding war, yet paying more then recommended still comes with no guarantee's only hope/expectation

I know the slow process of transaction of large amount of bitcoin is of concern to those in charge. I read lately of work been done to improve this. The speed of transfer is one of the advantages of bitcoin and it must be sustain as a edge.

Is true that with blocks full of transactions everyone wants to spend a small amount of btcs have to pay disproportionately big transaction fees. On the other side have you tried to sent money from Europe to USA for example? Why not check moneygram? Today  1 EUR = 0.992054 USD. If I want send from EU to USA 1 Euro I must pay 9.75 Euros that is 8.75 Euros = 0.0114829 Btc fees. Choice is yours.

It is a matter of perspective

Some people count the prices only by $1000's, so hundreds of dollars are nothing for them, let alone the current fees

Of course BTC is more for them than for people that earn few dollars a hour, or even a day

In a general perspective, I still think BTC is suited for low amount transactions. I see that youve sent 10mBTC. If you'd have added 1.2mBTC as fees it would have probably been a high priority transaction and possibly been cleared by now. Any smaller amount would make it medium or low priority. Whatever the amount as long as you are paying some mBTC as fees, your transaction will go through but the difference will be the time it would take for it to go through/confirmed. Its up to you how much fees or time you want your transaction to get processed by.

I would have to agree with you on this one, a Bitcoin transaction is very unlikely to ever get confirmed with a zero fee transaction.  I have sent a few in the past and the last couple have never confirmed.

1.2mBTC is a big payment for a fee already, you can have it confirmed in just a couple of minutes at around 0.25mBTC.  I have done this since last week and my transaction was confirmed fast.

I think bitcoin used to every kind of amounts. I transfer on my card bitcoins that I get from my campaign every week and it's not so big money. I just think that low transactions are not so profitable, you loose some money on tax every time.

The fees isn't decided that way. You should set the wallet fees through your preferences in your wallet, and you should set it to the recommended amount which is based on transaction size or something similar.

@Op do the same. Its true that you take a bigger hit as compared to before, but its still a very small amount. I would suggest send your non-urgent transactions through a lower fees and higher priority ones  through the right fees

No its not. Above posts will try to pretend it is, but its not currently and it never was.
In future, there will be alternate ways of paying with bitcoin with offchain solutions :) so in future yes.

yeah i think so , nowadays send low amount of bitcoin looks not worth
but you can still do it however , as long as you are comfortable with it
i just wondering with what you say about offchain solutions
it's has been discussed for years, so far no progress, but it could be cool if bitcoin transaction confirmed instantly.

You can send even a few satoshis if you wish, but the lower the fee is the slower your transaction will get confirmed. Be careful about these fees because sometimes my wallet auto sets 0.001 in fees or so, which is enormous. If you set around 10k satoshis, your transaction will be confirmed in a few days. I am working with 10k fees too, and they usually get confirmed within 48 hours.

I am quite skeptical about that. Usually off chain solutions work in a manner where you make many transaction with the same recipient. Making just one transaction is problematic in this case and the fees might still be high.

Time will tell for sure, but people working on bitcoin solutions are brightest minds out there so im sleeping well :) waiting for what to come.

so you have not read the documentation, concepts, current tests.
so your just relying on the trust of dev's?

i think its time you trust devs less and read what they are doing more.

LN's niche is not cheap/near free transactions for everyone. LN's niche is cheap near free transactions for doing several hundred transactions a month with a certain person.

they want to charge extra if you want to hop to third, fourth, fifth person, etc. they have alot more fee's/penalties if you try to close early. so all those people that only want to pay a person once even if indirectly connected.. wont benefit.

its more for gambling sits and faucets/adsense traders that want to get many amounts in a small time.

LN is not the endgoal of bitcoin, its just a side option. and wont be something everyone needs / uses

nope. not by a long shot any more. i think a lot of transactions are kinda frivolous, many of mine have been between wallets where i was just consolidating, and maybe people were abusing it beforehand like satoshidice, but i think it's a shame that modest transactions are being effectively priced out. i hope we're gonna get some viable options soon because i still want to use it for buying stuff.

Yeh, it be random.  I jist sent a small amount to a colleague o' mine on very low priority an' it went thru within a few minutes.  Then otha times it takes forever, even when it on higher priority.  This here is a bizarre network.  Sometime you win, sometime you lose wit' the speed.  Otha coins is definitely faster.

   I send and receive even smaller amounts then 10 mbtc, and I dont complain on anything. Waiting for confirmation can be annoying I know, but I have patience for now.
   Bitcoin is suitable for sending any amount, and I think confirmation time will be faster in the future. Developers will think of something.

I notice this transaction is already been sent or received here https://blockchain.info/tx/3493f7390da8e225a44ded54c413f6c0ced3ec3d566b89c0b3e463928f4ca1aa
According to the op with 250 minutes added included block time now i think i can see the result that +0 and its changing or op is mistaken to added it.
I saw that you are paying a lowest fee they are now relaying on the fee per size of the transaction. i am not paying fee the minimum fee that i paying right now is minimum 20k sat.. because it takes too long to sent if you pay small amount or below the minimum..

Yes as pointed out, while seven cents may not be a large amount of money to most people with access to the internet, to some people this is a much greater amount of money.
Its certainly a good point of debate. What is the appropriate rate for a transaction, should it remain scaling or a fixed rate?
These are important factors in deciding who is the target Bitcoin audience, actually.

a lot of it is up to the miners and there aren't very many american ones.

majority of miners dont care about the fee's. they just see it as a bonus.
they would add transactions even without fee's.

it will be several decades before fee's become important.
even now with a fee war pools still ignore transactions if it means shaving a few seconds to gain slight advantage over competitive pools to get a reward.

all they care about is the blockreward.

its the dev's that are pushing the fake narative that fee's need to jump up really high soon. all because they want to bait people offchain due to such unneeded expense.

its the same reason even after segwit gets activated people should only expect to get 7tx's .. much like what was expected from 2009+ anyways. its not anything new or any big growth. its just making gestures of goodwill to sway people in their offchain direction

Seriously speaking though, do you really think that it makes sense for every 7-cent transaction to be seen by everyone and propagated to every node in the world? When building a scalable system you don't just scale up in one direction - you also need to consider partitioning the data, and moving low-value transactions off chain makes perfect sense. When those 7-cent transactions add up to $7 or $70 then they can be consolidated and moved on-chain. The assumption here is that off-chain transaction costs are much cheaper (sub-cent)  and much quicker, though likely less secure.

bitcoin transaction may have a minimum, so we can not transact in small amount. bitcoin transactions, has a minimal fee, ie 0.0002 BTC, so you possibly, will not be able to conduct transactions under 0.0002 BTC. besides, if you're doing a mediocre transaction with a small fee, it might cause a delay in the confirmation.

Franky, you're never late when it comes to find a thread to spread your retarded bigblock propaganda. Congratulations, great shilling for your master as always!

Just ignoring the fact that the thread opener is a brand new member and is using a shitty third party service (with Roger Ver as an investor) and not a proper wallet, the following can be said regarding transaction fees:

Bitcoin is not suited for storing every single micro transaction instantly on chain - especially not when inadequate fees are paid for low-priority transactions. You can do it, but you have to pay adequate fees. In the future, there will be the possibility to send micro transactions using payment channels, which will greatly improve speed and costs while at the same time preserving the network decentralization of Bitcoin - an essential property of Bitcoin that malicious actors such as Roger Ver and his sockpuppets like franky1 actively seek to destroy by demanding block sizes so big, that privately owned full Bitcoin nodes will be eradicated because of bandwidth requirements.

ya.ya.yo!

i don't get why people on this topic are talking about everything except the fact that the transaction in OP had a Lock Time!
it is even possible some nodes rejected his transaction until it was in a block (hence the + 0 minutes in Included In Blocks field on blockchain.info)

I think yes, bitcoin is still suited for low amount transaction  and the fees transaction is not too high about 2k up to 5k Satoshi, except you used wallet bitcoin that apply high fees sending.
Usually i used mycelium wallet bitcoin, the fees is more cheap than btc.com in my experience.

i think its not because the low fee or normal fee or higher fee, its because the network have a heavy load for the transaction of sending and receiving so there will be many queue in the list of blockchain. this is the main problem of blockchain network that need to be fix soon because from time to time, the transaction list will become more big than now especially if the price of bitcoin is increase. so i think we have to be patience when we want to make transaction.

I don't think the Bitcoin system can support low value transaction now :( Considering the increased fees due to full blocks (and also Chinese miners mining empty blocks), the fee percentage of those transactions are very high now (e.g. 0.001 BTC for a 2k byte transaction which converts to ~9 inputs maybe from faucets, those inputs may worth 0.15 mBTC each and that 0.001 BTC is already 74% of the amount).

For OP's transaction, the fee don't even reached the 10000 satoshi standard fee even before full (and nearly full) blocks become common and would take a considerable amount of time to confirm even that... I'd recommend you to double spend the bitcoins with a higher fee this time (at least 10000 satoshi). (Just found out the tx already have 64 confirmations...) Next time send your bitcoins with at least 10000 satoshi fee if there's only 1 input and up to 2 output (the payment and your change). If more inputs are used than upgrade your fee to 20000 satoshi or more...

Try using an alternative coin like Mintcoin. It's much better.

Bitcoin don't have a minimal fee but recommended fee. You can set the fee and no matter how much the fee if you're willing the transaction to be sent then it will be sent. It's all depend on current fee/bytes and sending a transaction with an amount smaller than the minimal fee which you mentioned above ( 0.0002 ) is possible as long the fee meets the current recommended fee by calculating fee/bytes if you expect the transaction to be confirmed fastly.However you can also setting up a transaction with zero fee with the risk of rejected by network or taking few days to get confirmed

What`s the point of sending very low amount of btc to someone,like a few satoshis.

It`s pointless.It`s normal for the miners to focus on high fee transactions first.

Nobody said that bitcoin is a "no transaction cost" currency.

Every payment system needs transaction fees in order to work.

Ok, what other methods are currenctly cheaper than Bitcoin to send micro transactions? None. Have you used wire transfers or remittance services lately to send, say $2 to a friend in another country? No, because it is impossible to do with traditional payment systems. The fees charged, will consume the amount you were trying to send. This can be done with Bitcoin, for just a few cents, so stop spreading noncense and give credit where credit is due. ^smile^

I think although the transaction fees have gone up, I still think it is worth using Bitcoin for general transactions. I also try to make sure I am sending a decent fee because at the end of the day, everyone needs to make money including the miners and the pools etc.

If you are paying more in transaction fees than the amount you are sending across, it really doesn't make sense. People typically look at transaction fees as the percentage of the amount sent across. Transaction fees of more than 100% would break the back of most business models.

yes to less secure. but also
no to faster
faster is in the eye of the beholder. although fast to sign a multisig. the settlement due to CLTV and CSV is the same as the old banking/paypal system. funds are confirmed, but then have a maturity before they can be spend(CLTV) which means its like "unavailable balance". then there is the chargeback ability(CSV) that allows the other party to bypass CLTV and spend funds to themselves if they feel you have done payment theft.

no to cheaper
put it this way, the average real world person uses an ATM/debit/credit card 42 times a month.
LN's current concepts are to pay a hub to stay open 24/7 for 10 days, cover onchain deposit and onchain settlement aswell as the numeric representation of how many possible transactions can occur within the "channel". the upfront prepay deposit amount required to open a channel they deem as 0.006btc ($4.70) for 10 days https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/lightning-dev/2016-November/000648.html (as shown in the 'results'.

which we know 10 days is only a third of a month so 14 real world transactions average over 10 days.
which is 33cents/tx

i cant see any third world country or anyone agreeing to pay $4.70 upfront just to use a service for 10 days.

LN is not the 'scalability' cure/solution. it is simply a side service for moral spammers (faucets, gambling sites, adsense) not real people wanting to do their occasional shop for a loaf of bread.

again the devs are thinking about pricing bitcoin based on american income. not based on using code to control DDoS attempts. not using code to keep bitcoin open and border/barrierless for anyone.
its turning into a system only for the economically rich westerners

(disclosure: im a white brit with enough btc to happily retire, but i can atleast think selflessly to see the bigger picture)

Bitcoin has a big disadvantage, compared to other payment systems in every day life where we buy things which have not a big cost but we need a speedy transaction. I agree that micropayments channel is a big improvement in this way. Many people we will use it more often than now.

Bitcoin is still suited for low amount transaction but it takes time to be confirmed on blockchain since fees are included on every transaction we made. And the higher the fee you pay, the fastest is gets confirmed. But sometimes this doesn't matter on blockchain due to large transaction traffic on the site.

Could you at least check the nlocktime and to what extent it affected the transaction?
It didn't affect the transaction at all.  Block 444307 was mined 3 hours before the transaction was broadcast. This made the transaction standard and all the nodes would relay it without an issue.

Wait, what where? From what I can tell, "Chinese" mining pools are NOT mining empty blocks or blocks with low block size deliberately. From the blocks they mined for the day, the blocks that had small size were due to the succession of blocks being found.
There is no such thing as a standard fee. The only fee requirement that is remotely as close as that is the relay fee and it varies from node to node. It is relatively difficult to doublespend with the transaction in the mempool and with no Opt-in RBF flag. I doubt newbies would want to risk and do something wrong with their private keys anyway. The wallet should calculate it for you and you shouldn't touch anything except ensuring that the specified fees/byte is of good amount.

Bitcoin is good with any size transaction. Just make sure you put enough fee / byte of information when you are transferring higher amounts of bitcoins. If the ratio is kept it will be fine.


People only say there no transaction fees because they so small. If I use my bank card I spend 0.00045 per transaction even if it is small if I withdraw cash of up to 0.045 then I spend 0.00080 on transaction fees. Bitcoin ia only 0.0001 - 0.0002 .

Bitcoin could be used for any size transactions the question is the fee and if it's worth to pay having in mind the ratio abd the amount you are sending. And it's airways good to use recommended fee.
But don't forget that you very often also have fees on your credit cards, which are not small at all and we consider this as normal.

Absolutely , Micro transaction always end up paying much more transaction fee than the quantity you were sending.

Using other wallets that has no transaction fee better to do micro transaction on that wallet.

I don't know why this happened but I had never made any big transaction than 0.01 BTC .
You should directly contact to the blockchain .

I would honestly say that the transaction fees of bitcoin are what make it seem less functional than say a debit card where you can get things such as video games (In the United States) but with bitcoin the fee makes it more expensive to buy goods. Although the fee is rather tiny and its sort of flat of where other posters have said 2-15 cents, it still deters the purchasing of goods since these fees will exist.

Imagine adding more taxes onto goods being purchased with Bitcoin, it will probably make it seem less likely as an exchange medium if that is the case.

If you are transferring without any fees then certainly you can do minimum transaction with the risk that it may take days to confirm those type of transactions. Well on other hand minimum generally ht fees is 0.0002 so ideally you have transact a good amount so that % of fees of your transaction amount is bare minimum

bitcoin was never the best for very small transaction amounts although it have always been cheap. and now the situation is worse because of the fee wars. the blocks are full and the number of unconfirmed transactions are growing fast so we have to compete with each other by including more and more fees and it is making transactions more expensive.

This https://bitcoinfees.21.co/ can help you to understand what is the recommended fee to get your transaction confirmed within next block. I always use fee enough to make my transaction confirmed in next block and i don't mind to pay a little bit more to get it confirmed rather than waiting for several hours.

Good way to minimize the size/fee is to only have one input and try to send micro payments to multiple address in one transaction rather than sending them one by one.

Definitely yes I use it for small and big transaction all the time. And if you are aware of the recent PayPal change which you have to transact minimum of 1$, it has made Bitcoin small transaction more user friendly. Then in your case transactions take time dude, some days quick some days slow. So check in a while it will be confirmed.

If some one want much faster transaction,they paid much higher fee so they will receive it faster, if your not in a rush there's no problem to use low fee to send funds to any one. I only use local online wallet to save some of the fee and its much easier to use for to me to send fund to other people have transaction with me.

Why a Alt coin? Both parties know each other, so they just signup with Xapo or another off-chain solution and transfer the money at almost ZERO fees and it is instant. You can keep it in Xapo, but if you want to use it for something else, you will have to take it back on the Blockchain, and that will cost you some miners fees. A lot of people have Xapo, so you can pay with off-chain services like this or you can use their debit card. < This has fees >

Atleast this way, it stays within Bitcoin and no obscure Alt coin. ^hmmmm^

1) Secure
2) low fees
3) Decentralized

You can only pick two.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

If your priority is not security and decentralization then maybe you should be using a different cryptocoin.  

Bitcoin was never meant to be free. High fees protect the network from spam and ensure the security of our mining network to protect us from double spends and government takeovers.

Small block size protect us from centralization and denial of service attacks on our network nodes. 

I don't think lightning networks or side chains are a good option ether, they operate with lower standards of security.

Our only real option is to wait and survive long enough until the world wide internet can accommodate a low latency high bandwidth connection at low cost to all people.

This will take at least 10 more years.  

Until then the community will have to micro manage block size to the best of our ability.

Well the fee for me its not a problem if i am dealing to someone daily i just use the coinbase since the transaction fee is free but for a large transaction i am using electrum which is my main wallet where i stored all my bitcoin..
Coinbase is just for my daily use and local wallet like coins.ph is i use it too for daily use because they are not asking for the fee for every transaction..

actually what for sending a little amount?
i will stick to keep using bitcoin no matter how small the transaction it is (a reasonable transaction of course)
altcoin are not as popular as bitcoin , that is the problem ,
0.001 the lowest transaction i usually do and i think it is a reasonable amount instead 0.0001 or so.

Yes the processing fees are negligible; almost 0% processing fees.

i pick 1 and 2.. because number 3 is not a problem..

i laugh when people say the blocksize is massive..

um hello. 7 years of borderless payments of millions of people is the size of.....dramatic pause....... a fingernail
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/bTv0bAwwEP4/maxresdefault.jpg

as for saying high fee's protect against spam.. well define spam. because it seems many think that developing countries hourly wage is spam. even a weeks wage should be deemed spam
also CODE can avert real spam. such as not allowing someone to resend funds the same day/ within x blocks. or limiting sig-ops of transactions. and many other CODE techniques..

using economics fails because if it requires X just to get through the relay network everyone is gonna pay X. thus thats already pushing the fee upward. then the 'average estimate' mechanism, again everyone pay that so again pushes the price up without even considering spam.
and then lastly "average estimates" are not instantly reactive to low demand times and thus keep the price up even when there isnt demand

economic 'pricing' is not the solution to spam. its a barrier of entry/utility

It is discouraging to see small amounts with small fees tends to be the last priority in bitcoin transactions. As bitcoin price grew more bigger as time goes bye small transactions also increases in fees. But this is not a bad news, it really means that bitcoin becomes more in demand. But I am still hoping that transactions will be lesser than it is now.

I disagree that centralization is not an issue.

Long term security requires all users to be able to run and host full nodes on home computers and at low cost.

Server hosting companies in America just like in China, like Amazon and Google are under the control of their host governments.  If we are to be truly sovereign unto our selfs and beyond the reach of all possible intervention from world governments we need to run our network on our own hardware in our own homes.

The greatest cost in hosting a full node is not storage but bandwidth, the size of the blockchain is virtually free to store but to transmit that data at low latency to more then 8 peers continuously is very expensive to low income users.

If you doubt my claims run a full node for one month at your home and watch in horror as your ISP disconnects your internet for some violation in the terms of service agreement or charges you $200 pulse dollars in bandwidth fees.

The majority of the worlds population is limited to 1mb download speeds and 1/5 of that in upload speed.

I agree that there are software engineering solutions that can help combat spam but they in and of them selfs are not a solution.

Yes, Bitcoin is still suited to any amount transactions. You can send small amount bitcoin, but it may takes some time to be confirmed due to low fees to pay. You can set to higher fees to get faster confirmed transactions.

Well yes Bitcoin is suited for low amount transaction. Their is a satoshi the smallest fraction of Bitcoin. Most of the time you can earn it for free on Pay to click sites.

IMO, Bitcoin is no longer suitable for low amount transactions (online bank transfers and Paypal are also not suitable). A few days back, I was trying to transfer BTC0.025 from one of my wallets to another. The default tx fee, as shown in Blockchain.info was BTC0.015 ($10). Since I couldn't afford that much fee, I reduced it to BTC0.0001. The transaction took 5 days to go through.

It really depends, if you have to get your low amount transaction through within 10 or 20 minutes, you'd have to add a relatively big fee compared to the value of the transaction, this can vary quite a bit though.

If you can wait a couple of days, it will confirm, even with a low fee.

It's sadden situation to send low amount of bitcoin as it's consider not worth for now but we have to do that, right?
I mean, in the future of bitcoin will use as major payment or at least equal to fiat money, devs need to solve this fee problem.
We can't spend bitcoin in small amount I thought if the condition like this happens a lot, very long time confirmation to send small amount.

Network RULES don't work like that.
And that's why Bitcoin network ... drive so well since 2009.

When you transfer of bitcoin in the lesser amount the lesser
fees that you have. Its usually the least priority. This means
that bitcoin is in demand though. Thus, bitcoin is suited to
low amount of transactions.

I feel no. Bitcoin minimum recommended fee is getting higher and higher as I noticed.

Soon, its fee might not be an advantage anymore.

Bitcoin needs a technical redesign. Currently, it tolerates up to 7 transactions per second, which is tiny compared to thousand making transactions. Researchers believe that its capacity could be stretched to 27 transactions per second without a complete overhaul, but that's still small.

I just bought a 4TB hard drive for $140 cad... it's time for bigger blocks..  I have been against it but we need to do something.. even growing at half of moores law should work perfect..