Bitcoin Forum

Hi, I have heard that one of the good things about bitcoins is that it is free to transfer bitcoins between accounts/wallets with no fee and it is free to pay with it.
Now I have made deposited a small amount 10 euros to Copay and i want to move it to another wallet or buy something with it. I get this information when I try: Amount too low to spend, spending this balance will need significant bitcoin network fees!
Why is that? Are there a better way to store bitcoins?

Whichever way you store bitcoin there will always be network fees, so my suggestion is to use a wallet that allows you to customize your fee.

Always check what the number of transactions that are in the mempool when you want to transact and check the amount of fee required for the transaction size:

https://bitcoinfees.21.co/

So wait for a time (if you can) where the number of Txs in mempool is low. Fees should also be lower.

Thanks for posting that link.  I've been looking for a site that can do real-time fee tracking.

@OP: I use bitcoin core as my wallet, and it's very easy to modify the fee depending on how much you are sending and how long you want to wait.  Of course, you have to download the entire blockchain...

The fees are currently not the lowest they could be. SegWit effect should take place in the next upcoming weeks so the fees are likely to become less. For the meantime, It's better to use a wallet that allow dynamic fees so you change them, but you may face long confirmation times and also, avoid receiving multiple small amounts.

Yes there are network fees when transferring bitcoin to other wallet. But some wallets don't charge fees within the same wallet company like in my case coinsph to coinsph. I don't know if this applies to other online wallets.

It used to be essentially free to transact Bitcoins. Transactions were almost instantaneous and you could send with a very low fee (or even no fee) and it would go through. This was back when most people never heard about Bitcoin.

On the bolded part, there is actually a way to transfer without having to pay fees and this is applicable in some exchange sites where you generate a code and the other user can redeem such on that same exchange but transferring out will mean payment of fees. Aside this option there is no other way as you have rightly alluded as you must pay a particular fee but you can only control it in wallets such as electrum and blockchain.info and that's it.

If you are holding your BTC at an exchanges wallet, so they are deciding for you the fees, but if you make internal transactions to another exchange wallet, there arent fees
In generally the transactions cant be free, above all if you transfer to another system wallet
With a lot of wallet you can decided how much fee to pay, but more you pay and more faster is the transaction confirmed

where do you hear that bitcoin is free of charge when transactions transfer?
I think maybe you misunderstood the information.

Last year at this very time it was easier to transact Bitcoins and incur no fees especially for the small amounts, but later on fees came for every transactions, you could use electrum wallet, it sets fees as per the network, plus you could set up your own fees to, however I would not recommend this, cause if you pay to less fees it can take ages for you to transfer the coins, and also don't do transactions for such low amounts, you will end up paying high fees.

Originally, you could transfer large amounts of BTC with no fees.  Just like this transaction (https://www.coindesk.com/194993-btc-transaction-147m-mystery-and-speculation/), which transferred 194,993 BTC (now worth almost a billion dollars) for free.  Even then, including your fee would have given miners an incentive to include your transaction first, but your transaction would still have been included in a block.

But if transactions were free forever, you could imagine that there would be spam on the network.  An attacker could send an unlimited number of free transactions and fill the block space to such an extent that it's a terrible burden on full nodes and people no longer run the blockchain.

So satoshi made a limit to the size of blocks as a device against spam.  That means that an attacker can only send a certain amount of transactions before he fills the blocks, and then the attacker (as well as ordinary users, unfortunately) has to pay fees to include each transaction in a block until it becomes far too expensive to spam and they give up.

There are suggestions of raising this limit because arguably the blocks are becoming full by ordinary means, but some disagree with raising it.

---

Still, the transaction fees are not as high as you think.  Your wallet is suggesting too high a fee (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2142770.0), and a decent wallet will let you change it.

I transfer BTC to Poloniex using Abra wallet at 0.0045 and to my surprise it has no fees, I guess it depends on the online wallet services that they offered.

Not so long ago in service section I've seen a guy that accidently transferred bitcoins with 0 fee :) After he posted on forum omeone accelerated his post and he got confirmations so anything is real
P.S. Please do not try this at home (c) :)

No that's not correct, you need to include a fee for your payment if you want it confirmed and included in a block quickly, otherwise it will be pending for a long time and may even be cancelled. This fee however isn't given to the developers but as an incentive to the miner's including your TX in a block, currently, with the reward of block halved multiple times the fees are quite essential for miners.

you simply buy bitcoin with your tight money and you should not see bitcoin prices for 3 months to come after that you can see the value of your money can be sure you will get a big profit.

I think that there is no such wallet which allows free transactions.Transaction fee is the compensation which miners get to confirm our transactions by performing algorithmic puzzles.They buy powerful ASIC machines and spend electricity to do  mining operations.You could use the Electrum wallet in which we could set the transaction fee manually.If we set very low fee,then transaction confirmation would get late.So,setting a fee of 0.0003 btc is normal.But these fee would get reduced in the upcoming weeks when segwit gets completely locked in.

In the past, bitcoin transaction fees are very cheap and affordable for daily usage, but since the popularity and values of bitcoin start to rise, it attracts more people who never use bitcoin in the past to come into the crypto-currency community, I guess that is one of the reason that cause bitcoin transaction fees to rise, as there are more users sending transaction out from their bitcoin wallets nowadays as compared to the past.

I think you get a little wrong information. I think if you do bitcoin transfers, you will definitely stay on the fee fee. and now many are complaining because the fee for transfers or transactions is expensive.

I only thing that I know is a wallet of some gambling site which you can transfer your bitcoin without a fee but with local wallets or hard wallet what I also understand that there's corresponding fee for any transfer and its only depend on how quick you wanted it to be process.

Lmao… it’s  likely he came across an old bitcoin post on the internet, which the author never took the responsibility of updating his posts. This time around, sending bitcoin from one wallet to the other will cost you a fee. With the current rate of $4,500+, we need to pay as fee around $5 or so.

This is really a joke that bitcoin transaction is free of cost. I have never heard about this and it will never be free, because the management and controllers and the brokers who does transfer for you are not setting there for free.

They are also working for money and this is their job to cut some amount on your transaction. It is done all over the world not only in bitcoin but trading and transferring any digital and paper currency.

to transfer our bitcoin to someone else has a fee, the fee for transferpun quite large. but it depends on the wallet that we use, setial wallet has its own cost. there is also a free bitcoin transfer faislitas, but when we use the facility we must be careful for fear that the wallet that provides free transfer facility is a scammer

It is always like that for a transaction to be free then it is always a suspicious one, just like if you are getting to won the lottery for free and not doing anything or getting a text message about free stuff, It is good to check first about everything you will do Bitcoin is at stakes here so be very vigilant in getting into transactions seek good feed backs first or information about the site, well I think the guys here provided OP with some good information in what to use and what to do.

Why people call Bitcoin to be the best way to transfer money at free of cost because the fees isn't that big as compared to amount and thus is negligible. You can transfer even 1-1000 BTC at $1-$3 of transaction fees. It is almost nothing as compared to the amount. That fees seems big when the transactions are small and transaction is happening in same country as was your case because otherwise it is free.

But here the fees is being compared to global transfer. Fees is way too small when compared to remittance fees on which countries are spending trillions of dollar every year and that is why Bitcoin is considered to be the best way to transfer money when it comes to countries and can help in saving trillion of dollars of nations that goes in remittance fees.

Indeed.  You have no idea how important it is to use a wallet that lets you set
the fee until you try to do it and have to spend $4 to send $30 worth of BTC.  Then
you're pulling your hair out by the roots.  The blockchain wallet for mobile lets you do it,
and Mycelium to some extent, although you can't set anything lower than "low-priority"
which sometimes is very high.  Electrum is a good wallet for setting fees low.  Those are
all mobile wallets.

Good luck.  Fees are a pain in the ass and are variable, but they're a fact of life for BTC.

I do not think bitcoin transactions cost.

Yes, the good things about Bitcoin are :

• no limit for transactions
• you can transfer as much as you want
• with amount of money as much as you want
• no maximum amount of money when you transfer

But, it will always require fee if you want to transfer BTC. Some wallets allows you to customize your fee. The higher fee you give, the faster transactions will be made. But there is also a minimum amount of fee that you must pay. You cannot change it to 0 or 0.1 cent, it will be to low. You can see it for yourself on the wallet, for example : Blockchain.

There is always pay in transferring bitcoin, think of it as maintenance fee. If every transaction per person use the system so everytime that someone will transact little by little the system wears off and there will come a time that it will break down, so this fee is to maintain that everything will run smoothly and then some of this fees are used to upgrade the system. If the high transaction fees worries you then you just have to find another wallet that have low transaction fees.

this is not technically true.
you can send bitcoin with 0 fees (for free) and as a matter of fact it (used to) propagate and be confirmed withing minutes even. although with the recent changes to bitcoin core this is dying slowly with the default "minrelaytxfee" and stuff like that. but otherwise miners picked up 0 fees so far.

Welcome to bitcoin world. Transferring bitcoin to other wallet or account is not free, it is always have fees on transferring it. Every transactions that you do in bitcoin has a fee. What I can say is you must find a wallet which cost less fees when you transfer bitcoin to another wallet or account, or when you have some transactions in bitcoin. Do some researches to find a better bitcoin wallet. Good luck I hope for ypur success with bitcoin.