Bitcoin Forum

Disclaimer:  Failed every math class I ever took.  Be gentle.

When I tried to send 0.77 BTC from my QT wallet to my online wallet today, I was told I had to pay a 0.001 fee.  (it was either that or 0.01)

That's nearly $0.83 USD now that BTC is around $830. (Even if im completely doing my math wrong and its $0.08 USD that's still ridiculous).  If I had sent a whole Bitcoin I assume I would be pushing $1.00.

1)  I believe this is a leftover price from the early days, when 0.001 was nearly nothing.  Shouldn't that fee be getting progressively smaller?

2)  I thought Bitcoin was supposed to be "virtually" free?  At the very least, why am I paying more than CHASE charges me to transfer to myself (completely free).  I realize the blockchain doesn't know both addresses are me, but hey, that's not my fault.  

You are paying to support the bitcoin network.

So you don't wanna pay anything? I you don't like it, then don't use BTC... Oh w8 you wanna make money but you dont wanna pay anything in process...

You could use coinbase to save your $1 in transaction fees.

Settings-options  then fill in the amount you want to pay.

The standard fee is 0.0001  (about 8c) - but you can choose to pay 0btc fee. Try a different wallet.

I have a feeling bitcoinqt won't let you send with a zero fee if it is require by the protocol for your transaction (read http://bitcoinfees.com/ to see how it is calculated), but a 0.77 bitcoin transaction would almost certainly go through with zero fee unless it's made up of dust, or new coins.

You don't have to pay the fee do you? And $1 to send nearly $800 doesn't seem too bad to me.

As you thought, the transaction fees are getting higher when the BTC price climb. The core developpers are working on this matter:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1w34ov/4_new_bitcoin_features_revealed_by_core_developer/

Excellent news. I see Bitcoin advertised as having "near zero" fees while fees can be quite expensive.

That's by far the worst possible reaction to his concern dear Sir.
Trying to defend a 1 dollar fee in a system that profiles itself as being almost free is the most hypocritical thing i've seen in a while.

At least some other people from the community have been less negative and explained the OP in a nice manner how he could get lower cost by switching to a recent client, instead of being a general douche bag, and saying he should stop using bitcoin.

Bitcoin-QT (software) to Android Bitcoin wallet (software) : 0,0001 to 0,0002 BTC of fee MAX !




your online wallet ... is the problem (it's a commercial service).
when i transfer from virwox to my bitcoin-QT, the fee is 0,002 BTC.

if u wait a certain time (i think 6 months) for them to "mature", you don't have to pay any transaction fees

Thank you for an intelligent response.


Yes.  It forces me to pay the fee when I try to send.  I guess the coins are "new"  <--- nice arbitrary rule? 

If Bitcoin has any hope of being used for daily commerce this ridiculous "must be 6 months old" rule needs to be eliminated as well.

And either way, a dollar is fucking ridiculous for sending 1 bitcoin.  


What he said ^^^^^^


Correct.  I want to do it 100% free of charge.  Like I can through my Bank:  That entity which Bitcoin is supposed to be so much better than, because it brings us lower cost/free transactions.

With the evil, inferior, (soon to be destroyed by Bitcoin?) CHASE bank, I can transfer an unlimited dollar amount between my own bank accounts for free.

I can also now send up to $5000 to anyone else in the world with a CHASE bank account, 100% free of charge, instantly. I pay one of my vendors this way monthly.  We dumped Paypal because of it.

So why do I have to pay to transfer money to myself (or anyone else on the Bitcoin Network)?  

I know.  The miners need to get paid.  Hmm .....

We're already inferior to Chase bank.  How does that make us feel?

Even if the core dev team "works to lower it" as the price of BTC rises, its still free through my bank.  Thus the point of this thread.

-B-

It is a super tiny fee that is paid to the miners for their work in veryifying your transaction. I believe you can do it for no fee, but then there is no incentive to the miner, and therefore your transaction can take a super long time. From what I have seen, people who send with no fees are frequently back on this forum saying "the money i sent never arrived and it has been like 10 hours... Etc"

Ultimately you are supporting the community and its growth. Go take $20 out of an atm and see how much you are charged. Typically you are charged $2-$3 by the atm company itself, and then again by your own bank for using an outside network.  This price is doubled if you are at a strip club or casino lol.

Overall the fee is so tiny, that you shouldnt even really notice or worry about it :)

It isn't arbitrary, it's designed to prevent tiny spam transactions that would fill up blocks and prevent any other transactions from being included.

If you know of better ways to prevent malicious spam transactions while keeping the fees very low for everyone else, please contact the devs.

Depending on your use case, perhaps you could have swept the private key into the new wallet instead of broadcasting a transaction on the block chain.

Also, if the "online wallet" you've sent your coins to is a service which holds the private keys for you, you haven't made a transfer from "your account" to "your account". This transaction would be more like transferring money from bank A to bank B, which would typically involve fees.

Edit: I've been using Bitcoin for three years and have never needed to include a fee for a transaction, but I have anyway in order to support the network.

You might be right here, but just checking. I am using Multibit wallet and it charges me 0.0001 BTC (not 0.001 BTC), so that's $0.08, not $0.8 at current rates.
But you mentioned Qt wallet and I have no idea about the charges on that one.

I agree with this comment and changing wallets or making sure your settings are correct.



.000? have been the fees for most of my transfers

What I always wondered about is where do these fees go to? Are they always going to the site that you have your wallet on? So theoretically there could be sites that require no fees to send BTC?

So none of these fees go to Satoshi himself?

It is not a secret, transaction fees go to the miners. Whoever find a block and put in that block your transaction get the fee  ;)

I've been experimenting with .0002 Tx fees and they work just fine.

1 day not six months. 24 hours for a fee-less 1 bitcoin transaction. More for a smaller transaction.


Is it a dollar? Or 8 cents. How about you clarify what you are talking about first? Tell us the fee in bitcoins.

And FYI the fee does not increase based on the amount of the transaction. It is based on the size of the transaction in bytes.


LOL that's totally untrue. US only may be free but not worldwide. SWIFT wires are extremely costly and so is western union. CHASE or whatever does NOT have its own system for global money transfer despite whatever marketing told you. It uses SWIFT like everyone else. If you are not paying a fee then your vendor is and he's transferring that cost on to you in what he's charging you. No one is getting a free lunch.

Another thing you should be aware of your bank is transferring debt. Bitcoin is asset based. As long as you control the private key you own the coins regardless of what anyone else does.

0.0001 fee is fine.  Works great.  No issues.  You can specify the default fee in Armory if you use that, which I do.  Might even get away with 0.000012 with no problems.  Haven't tried that yet though.  0.000012 is about 1 cent at the moment.

We certainly shouldn't be promoting that bitcoin is "zero fees" compared to the other processors.   :-\

Instead of 0.001 you should use 0.0001. thats about 10 cents and thats pretty much what it costs to have your transaction almost guaranteed to be included in the very next block. just look for something like advanced send or advanced options to manually set it to that value.

0.0001 is the default fee i've alway used.  Which is about 8cents for 1btc at current prices.  While it's true the price of fee's have gone up, thats still a fraction of a % .

It's alo true though that developers are working on trying to make sure the fees stay low as bitcoin's price goes up.

Thats incredibly cheap....

The people saying it is needed to support the miners are not taking into account that we are still in the phase where the miners are being issued BTC rewards.  The fees are really a bonus.  10 cents should be plenty at this point in time.

It depends on the backlog of unconfirmed transactions. (https://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions) The whole Bitcoin system has a limit of about 7 transactions a second. Usually the queue is short (under 1000 or so), but during periods of heavy activity, the backlog can increase. Miners take the transactions with the highest reward first, so, during busy periods, it costs more to get a transaction confirmed in a reasonable time. Most free transactions still eventually get processed.

Whether this will change is up to the big mining pools.

You could always use Western Union

That wouldnt be nice if you sent it without a fee, Because there is no guarantee. ;)

So? You can do that with Bitcoin-Qt too. Create multiple accounts (not to be confused with addresses) and you can transfer as many bitcoins from one to other as often as you like for free. The reason it's free is that in neither case are you creating an actual transaction. This may come as a surprise to you, but CHASE does not, in fact, initiate a wire transfer when you transfer your money from one of your own accounts to another. Why would they? You're not actually moving your money anywhere. But that's not what you're doing here. What you're doing is the equivalent of transferring money from your CHASE account to another account at another bank. It doesn't matter that you own both accounts, you still have to pay the usual fee.

And I fund my Ally account easily with my Chase or Bank of America account. I can easily fund my eTrade money market account through any of my bank accounts for free. Look, no one's trying to say fiat is better or whatever, and we're all Bitcoin fans here, but the fact is in its current state, Bitcoin is just not as consumer friendly as it should be. You're right, we shouldn't expect all these good things for free, but at the same time, when you can I can painlessly transfer my friends money using Paypal or and expect to cash out just as painlessly, I don't think it's unfair to expect the same for the Bitcoin network considering we're spending all our time sunshine pumping it to all our friends.

NO!

the reward for solving the block is their payment. the transaction fee is simply a bonus, and a greedy bonus at that. transaction fees are not "required" as the block reward is adequate. only when the block reward halves a few more times, would it then be required. which is definetly not any time soon.

i find the transaction fee's becoming the biggest deterrent to bitcoin adoption.
no longer do we need to worry about silk road bad press.
no longer do we need to worry about many other things. but the transaction fee is just like bankers bonus... ridiculous and greedy.

a note to all pool miners:
if you did not realise it already but most pool owners keep the transaction fee total and only share out the block reward with you all. ontop of this they normally charge you a fee for using their pool too. so please to not defend transaction fee's as if it pays your bills. because infact it in the majority only pays for pool owners, whom already get a nice cut of your earnings anyways.

Sorry still never saw what the final number is but usually with QT I've managed 0.0001 fees plenty of times and have no problem with that.  I've set it to 0 and many times (not all) it's gone through fine; just takes forever to confirm.  Just my two bitcents.

Just because you don't see the costs associated with your bank transactions, doesn't mean they're not there. Most banks charge a periodic account-fee for example. Additionally, banks use fractional reserves to lend out most of your money, sometimes to shady investments that go belly up and either cause you to lose your deposit or for the government to bail the bank out with tax-money.

Either way, these services cost money and you pay the money. Either through direct payments per transaction, a periodic fee or simply the fact that your money isn't fully secured.

Bitcoin at least is transparant in its price. You pay a small fee for a regular transaction and that's it. There's no monthly account fee and any coins in your wallet are truely yours.

I'm with this guy on this, fees should be zero right now.  Miners are already getting compensated 25 btc per block.

Well 0.001 is certainly expensive  ??? . I usually send with 0.0001 fee only and it goes without much delay. the no-fee ones take a long time to pass since they aren't offering the miners anything.

So, Its like the IRS in the blockchain haha, I would send with smaller fees if its a smaller transaction, But if its over 50 I would spare 1 dollar I guess.

a 10cent fee on a 10$ transaction is a 1% fee. Not high, but not exactly low. Definitely not "0 fee"

Of course there is an incentive for the miner.  The incentive is in finding the block.
Finding the block pays them 25BTC.  Now including the tx in a block based on the fee is a good idea to keep the miners in business, it's extra money.  Eventually when we run low/out of new BTC then the mining fee will be strictly nessecary.  Nevertheless please don't spout out that a fee is nessecary to keep the miners in business, it's false.  It helps them turn a bigger profit, that's all.

I say this as someone who has 5MH/s of scrypt and 10GH/s of SHA256 mining away right now.

The more you're sending, the lower the fee you can get away with. If you're sending 50 XBT, it's highly likely that you could still do that for free with very little delay.

My most recent free transaction was for 0.025 and even that got included almost immediately.

http://bitcoinfees.com

there's some hypocrisy here from people who tout crypto currencies as a way to avoid fees from credit card companies and the like and then start screaming about people not wanting to pay their bitcoin fees.... if I have to pay a 1% fee I may as well have fraud protection, universal acceptance, and the ability to reverse my transactions if I'm ripped off. Just saying. ;)  (Actually it's the merchant that pays the fee, the credit card user does not.. at worst the price of the fee is factored into the price of the item being purchased)  I can handle 8 cents though if that's all the fee is... but I'm not paying 1 to 2 percent.

You can change the settings in the QT client such that you pay no fee (or you can choose to pay more). By paying no fee you can expect your transaction to take longer, how much longer is anybody's guess, we don't know. But if your transaction doesn't isn't time sensitive, then you can set it to a zero fee.

You can transfer that Bitcoin without using a fee. There are several methods and they include time, collateral money or both:
- Send it with 0 fee and wait 4-40 hours until it is prioritized high enough and some pool or miner agrees to accept it
- Send to yourself or the destination only some of the inputs such that the fee is 0, repeat until you spend it all
- Send to yourself the inputs grouped in such a way that the fee is 0, wait a few hours until the spent coins can be merged again and repeat until you spend it all
- Send the inputs along with a bigger sum of dormant Bitcoin (something like 1+ BTC) and ferry the inputs one by one grouped with this bigger lump until you merge them all
- Ask a miner nicely to include your transaction without a fee and send it to him

I am eager to wait for your reply as to the method used to spend nothing to send that 1 Bitcoin, while wasting several hours of your precious time that apparently is less than 1$/hour :)