Bitcoin Forum

Why did I have to pay about ~$0.25 or ~0.28% to send money from one address to another? That seems insanely high considering my bank would only charge me $0.15 to deposit the USD equivalent of that amount of BTC to my account. Not to mention the transaction still will take about an hour to confirm sufficiently.

Bitcoin keeps advertising itself as a low fee transaction network and yet I'm stuck paying those kinds of fees? Multibit alone doesn't allow custom tx fees, but say I sent it with 0.0001 tx fee instead of 0.0003, how much longer could I expect to wait for the transaction to be accepted?

Here's the transaction on the block chain: https://blockchain.info/tx/d2b674248fb3350ff6dcff1a5ddc3caabe6f8adfc40a5d87866a5e1ed67e956b

Thanks for any info.

Because your transaction size was more than 2kb, and it costs 0.0001 / kb rounded up that would be 0.0003 BTC

Your transaction was probably composed of many different inputs.

14 inputs to be exact.

I figured this was the problem. So inputs accumulate on an address until that address makes a "send" to another address then certain inputs are considered "spent" based on how much I've sent?

How am I supposed to avoid these fees anyway? One of bitcoin's strongest and most advertised features is it's ability to have a secure transaction network with low fees.

I mean all of my inputs are generally >= 0.01 BTC.

Yes, you're basically correct - you must have just been unlucky. There isn't really a way to avoid paying fees - to do so would mean your transaction would take ages to confirm and might even get rejected completely.

To fix the high transaction fees there needs to be a free-market for fees, which is in the pipeline in bitcoind I think.

This topic is slightly old but still relevant.

Can anyone elaborate on how this works? Addresses accumulate "inputs"?

I mean, if I buy something for a dollar, 6 cents is a big deal. That's the same as sales tax. I just tried to send a transaction and it wanted to charge me 12 cents. I canceled it instead. That's just not acceptable.

I'm using Multibit. I'm trying Armory, but the 40gb it needs is taking a long time. Electrum isn't able to import my keys and I'm frankly not going to look up how; I'm a programmer, and if it isn't immediately obvious to *me*, I don't know how you expect the general public to adopt a thing. So I'm looking for a lightweight wallet that lets me set the transaction fee.

The more inputs the bigger, physically in bytes, the transaction.  The bigger the transaction the more you need to pay.  This has nothing to do with which wallet you use.  All good wallets will suggest the same fee.  If you do not pay the suggested fee then your transaction will either take a long time or never get confirmed.  Make sense?

I believe the advanced send options on the blockchain.info wallet let you set the fee.

They accumulate outputs (not inputs) of previously incoming transactions. They will be connected 1:1 to an equal amount of inputs of a new transaction once you send them.

It works like in the real world with small coins, if you only receive money in small amounts of cents then your wallet will become heavy and full of small pieces of copper. When you decide to spend it it must be counted and that costs fees.

Received bitcoin amounts (outputs of incoming transactions) are lying at the address that received them as individual pieces of data ("unspent outputs", "UTXO") and they don't move until they are spent again. They accumulate. Only when you spent a certain amount it will collect as many of these small outputs as needed and connect them to the inputs of a new transaction that "melts" them together to a larger amount. This transaction will have a lot of inputs and two outputs, one for the amount you want to pay (which is then again laying at the receiving address as long as it is not moved again by the receiver, but it will be all in one output) and another small output for your change (if the inputs didn't add up exactly there will be something over that must be directly sent back to you (again as a small output that will eventually spent by you later)).

I never used multibit before. is there any sending options in multibit? like make a custom fee for larger transaction?
or we can't adjust fee in multibit?

No, its calculating the fee automatically based on the size (kilobytes) of the transaction and some other data (I believe its using the "officially" recommended algorithm to calculate it). I guess if it had the option to lower the fees then even more n00bs would post complaints about stuck or "lost" coins in MultiBit because they can't be bothered to read the user manual and deviate from the recommended defaults without knowing what they are doing and then blame it on the Software that only did what it was told to do.