Bitcoin Forum

How can we avoid transaction fees?  Could we have an electronic bank that lets us place transactions with the mony, but only make one transaction a month of all of them at once, then we just pay the horrible 0.0001 fee one time a month, like a credit card or something..

Less than 5 cents?
Those fees are virtually free for large transactions.
For small amounts you can use Doge or some other alt and the fees are under a penny.

Open a server for pool of mining.
You can emit transaction freely ...

http://30.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lu308jMkrz1qe0eclo1_r33_500.gif

Hahaha.... :)
I must say LOL! :)

0.0001BTC so "horrible" :P hehe.... it is 4 cents? :) or ~   am I right?

And you can always install Bitcoin-qt and pay 0 fee. And with a bit of determination you can pay no fee and wait similar time as when sending money via bank accounts...

And when you pay "horrible" 0.0001 BTC you are 99,99999% sure that your transacion will be confirmed within xx minutes where xx is a number from 1 - ~60 (in most cases it is MUCH less than 60min)

And you say

:) Come on man :P this is a joke.

You must have high priority transaction. Check Bitcoin wikipedia

Maybe this thread is a parody of "stupid threads?"

find a pool that does not care about fee's (basically ignore eligius as they are greedy fee grabbers) and ensure that your bitcoin client AddNodes only the supernodes belonging to fair/cheap fee pools. if everyone done the same then the greedy pools wont get the transactions relayed to them before the fair/cheap miners are already calculating their block ( which hopefully if they have enough hashpower, they would also solve the block with that nice few miliseconds head start)

if only everyone deleted nodes that link to greedy miners. then those gready miners wont receive transactions to process (Utopian dream i know)



nah we want bitcoin to succeed. i know you doge fan boys want bitcoin to fail, by demanding bitcoin pools to be greedier and thus less appealing. but i would truly love to only need bitcoin to buy a 1day pass to read an article in a newspaper or magazine for a few pennies.. without being charged the same or more few pennies for the privilege.

If you want to run a bank primarily dealing with the kind of people who are too cheap to pay $0.04 a transaction, and making $0.50 per customer per year, go ahead.

says the greedy mindset of a person that does not understand bitcoins vision..

the 25btc is more then enough per block for miners.. if these same miners think that 25btc is not enough and they want extra subsidy bonus. then they need to go back to fiat,

these greedy miners that think 25BTC reward does not cover the costs, are the stupid neanderthals that sell there bitcoins below their costs.. and i facepalm all of them for doing so. as all they care about is FIAT profits.

fee's shouldnt be a "requirement" until 2140 not 2014.. so please swap the numbers around as you must be dyslexic to get the 1,0,4 in the wrong order and think of now 2014. and then when you get your block reward. dont be in a hurry to convert it into FIAT.

Ok, got it, we're all really greedy.

Why not give us a big middle finger by doing exactly as you suggested and setting up a Bitcoin bank that lumps transactions into one?

Yeh, you can make internally fee-free transactions on inputs.io.

Oh wait.

Seriously tho, it would be decentralized and you (and the receiver?) would need to trust that service, which you shouldn't.

TBH 4,6 cents on a small transaction can be relatively much. Of course on a million dollar transaction it's nothing. Even on a couple hundred dollar I guess it's no big deal. But if you want to buy coffee every day with bitcoin IMO 4,6 cents is too much. Solution? IDK (I assume the solution now is to buy a $50 giftgard for your coffee or something so you only have to pay transaction fee once.)

Mining doesn't work that way.  Miners are always working on the next block.  If they have no tx to include it will simply be an "empty" (only the coinbase tx) block.

How much do you think paying for that coffee today with a cc costs?  A lot more than 4 cents.

no why dont we realise that the protocol is meant to give freedoms to transmit wealth. and not to make people wealthy. its the exchanges and product sales (layers above the protocol) which is where the wealth is made and measured.

the reward for mining .. THE BLOCK REWARD .. is more then enough.. imagine that as the salary for doing your job (confirming transactions) and stop thinking you need a bonus (the fee) just for doing your job.

think about your salary as your sole income.. and stop selling your pay cheque below your cost of living.. hold onto your pay check and create a demand to get a better value for your pay check.

those that cash out below cost of living are losers. they then cry that they want a bonus.. they are personally shooting themselves in the foot in 2 ways
1) causing a pric drop by selling out at a loss
2) demanding fee's which causes bitcoin to be less appealing, causing demand to drop. which again causes the price to drop because large numbers of people are not buying it.

please get your greedy mindsets of this weeks profiteering out of your brains.. and think of the long picture...

and as i said before those that dont care about bitcoin, understand bitcoin or want to think about the big picture. that are only in it for a quick fiat bonus.. please go back to your fiat world, you greedy dumb, people  

You CAN avoid fees if you wait long enough for your coins to mature. It's no secret. You can't send less than 0.01 though. But is 0.0001 btc so horrible?

Well personally I would pay coffee with cash. But I understand what you are saying.

In the Netherlands we don't use much creditcards but Maestro debitcards instead, and I had a quick look and paying with that costs € 0,07 - € 0,31 per transaction* for the merchant. I guess the difference is that the merchant pays it and the customer doesn't notice any costs directly. (obviously it is calculated in the merchant's cost so the product price would be higher and the customer does notice it indirectly.)

I also know that online payments in the Netherlands mostly go through iDeal (connected with all banks) and the costs for that are around € 0,45 per transaction. Creditcards 2,25% + €0,25 per transaction. PayPal 3,4% + €0,35 per transaction.



So yeh, in the end "even" with small transactions I guess bitcoin is much cheaper. For online transactions always much much cheaper. It's probably just the idea that you pay it directly as the customer and not the merchant (and you indirectly.)

Also if the merchant charges €2,00 for coffee for people who pay with debitcard and €2,00 in bitcoins + your bitcoin transaction costs, it is still more expensive with bitcoin since you are indirectly paying for the debitcard costs of the merchant already too.

I do think bitcoin is still in the beginning of acceptance so perhaps this will change. Like merchants can specifically say that they charge you 0.0001 less for transactions fees (obviously only relevant for the smaller payments) or even some discount if accepting bitcoin is cheaper for them.


EDIT: there are also examples of websites who do implicitly charge transaction fee. Best example in NL would be the biggest Dutch website to order food online: thuisbezorgd.nl, they say:
iDEAL: € 1,00
Creditcard: 6% of total
PayPal: 6% of total
Bitcoin: no transaction costs.
That's great I guess. In that perspective that €0,032 euro transaction fee looks really cheap, even on a small food order.


* With 1000+ transactions it's € 0,07 - minimum of 100 transactions which is € 0,31 per transaction. Excluding any "normal" monthly/yearly bank account fees.

"Doge or some other alt" does not equal "you doge fan boys want bitcoin to fail"
Wow...   :D

but instead of making bitcoin more useful or user friendly for everything, by people demanding that mining pools and the protocol should lower the fee's. instead your advice is to tell people to move away from bitcoin and use something else.. so yes i call you a dogecoin fanboy

A free exchange.  Peer-to-peer.  It remembers what was exchanged/traded and an ID representing the person (can be anonymous).

Example:

Initiating promise:  patio furniture
Notice - accept:    0.1 BTC
Promise:              0.1 BTC
Deliver:               0.1 BTC
Deliver:               patio furniture
End transaction

It is a standard structure of messages showing every stage of the transaction.  It is also a "Promise Reporting" system.  It allows "Promise Assurance" companies to guarantee transactions between anonymous people and "Wealth Translation" to occur if the "initiating promise" and "notice - accept" values are incompatible (IE. barter-intermediaries).

Well, if you used to use inputs, it didn't bother with transaction fees. But of course, we all know what happened to that one.

There are others, you can use most exchanges to use vouchers or coupons, and those normally don't have transaction fees. I'm guessing coinbase has an internal transfer from one account to another (I'm not yet a user of that one, maybe I should go make an account.)

I've tried: btc-e, gox (before it busted), cryptsy. You can send BTC to another account instantly. These are not on the blockchain. Even some of the game sites have internal transfers: dice, poker, etc.

NONE of those are recommended. The 0.0001 transaction fee is essentially insurance that your transaction is good, cleared, final, irreversible, whatever.

BTC fees were slashed not too long ago; They are extremely fair for most transactions.
Currently, BTC is not usable for tiny payments: Will that ever change?

Why would you want to avoid such a small fee?

What if the transaction is more than 100KB in size. Will anyone pay a transaction fee of 10 m BTC for transferring 25 mBTCs?

What is/could be inside the 100KB?
If you value the chance to securely transfer the data...

OP, I hope you understand why transaction fees are beneficial to the BTC system...

If a person spends a lot of time to collect mBTCs and uBTCs from various faucets, he will be left with a small BTC amount which is quite big in transaction size. And if the guy only have some 0.2 BTC or 0.3 BTC with him, he won't be too happy to pay half of that amount in transaction fee.

OK, I see:
If a person spends a lot of time.....small BTC amount...
They can set a "custom fee" of 0.00005 (for example)
They might have to wait a while, but it will eventually go through.

If you are careful and patient you can collect small inputs into larger outputs without paying fees.

You might have to be very patient though, since the threshold for an input to a high priority transaction is roughly one BTC-day, so a 0.001 input would need to mature for 1000 days.

Of course at that point you are also betting the rules won't change in the next 1000 days.

That is a good option. But it would have been even better, if we could somehow find-out the default transaction fee before we actually make the transaction (i.e to find out how much is the transaction size in KBs). Right now, if we are paying the default transaction fee we can find it out only after the coins are sent.

You can't avoid transaction fees. Nothing is for free and there would be even cost of electricity to pay.

Only way we could get rid of transactions fees would be constant donations. Such idea though could be a bit unstable.

The client tells you what the transaction fee would be if you input less than what it thinks you should send.

You can avoid transaction fees by following the rules.

they help paint BTCitcoin as a "professional" system rather than play money.

Fees are necessary to discourage spam and denial of service attacks.

If it weren't for that, we could eliminate fees by making the currency inflationary forever. Miners could be rewarded at a rate of, say, 1% of minted coins per year. In effect, everyone would be paying them to validate transactions through the devaluation of their held coins. Some economists prefer this model because they think the inflation encourages spending which encourages economic activity and wealth-creation. (Others dislike it because it encourages consumption, and because of edge effects where-by you can't set interest rates to below zero.)

Alternatively, the actual costs of mining could be reduced by switching to a proof-of-stake system. Then we wouldn't need ridiculously powerful computers to mine on, and ridiculous amounts of electricity to run them. You'd still need some way to discourage denial of service attacks, though.

Agreed. But as the time progresses, the transaction size will increase. After 2-3 years, the average transaction will be 20KB or 30KB. The fees will become quite heavy then.

You can't avoid transaction fees. Nothing is for free and there would be even cost of electricity to pay.

+1

Why would the average tx be 30K.  The average tx today is ~600 bytes and isn't projected to increase.

Wow.  Lots of arguments for a perpetual fee.  See my post above for avoidance of such.

So replace a tiny fee for a much larger one?  Even if the system is feasible on a large scale (unlikely), there will still be counterparty risk.  You are trading direct counterparty risk with the risk of the assurance entity.  Still from a fee standpoint it would be a massive step back.  Your third party reinsurance entity isn't going to take risk for no gain.  Their reassurance fee would have to cover the costs of verify entities, establishing their credit worthiness, protecting against fraud, and covering the % of transactions which are defaulted on.  Fees are very low 0.1 mBTC per KB.  On a 1 BTC transaction that is 0.01% of transferred amount.  Can a third party reduce that cost significantly?  I would say no.

Bitcoin fees are very low 0.1 mBTC per KB.  On a 1 BTC transaction which is under 1KB that is 0.01% of transferred amount.  There are a couple of things which "could" reduce this further in the future. 

Currently miners ranks fees by the ACTUAL FEE / ACTUAL TX size.  The client however rounds up to the nearest full KB when paying fees.  This means that a user interested in minimum fees is overpaying what would be required by a miner with the same requirement.   For example say a typical miner requires a fee of 0.1 mBTC per KB and fees less than that are treated as non-paying.  With average tx being 600 bytes this means a fee of only 0.06 mBTC is needed (0.06 mBTC *1000 / 600 bytes) to be above the 0.1 mBTC threshold required by the miner.  Right now the client would round the 600 bytes up to 1KB and add a fee of 0.1 mBTC to the tx which is 0.04 mBTC more than required.  From a miner's perspective the tx has a fee of 0.167 mBTC per KB.

The client should be modified to make the fee paid based on actual tx size not rounded up to the nearest KB.  Miners already use this methodology for ranking tx for inclusion in the next block so it makes little sense for the client to use a different methodology when deciding on the fee paid.    

The fee required for relaying by v0.9 nodes has been reduced 90% to 0.01 mBTC per KB.   The client doesn't yet allow paying a fee that low (when a fee is required).  This is done intentionally to ensure that when the client does allow that there will be enough nodes which will relay those tx to avoid them being "stuck".  Future versions of the client will also allow creating at this reduced fee level.  

If you combine those two changes it would reduce the fee required to relay an average 600 byte transaction to a mere 0.006 mBTC (600 sat) or roughly ~0.3 US cents per tx.  Now relaying doesn't mean a miner will include it in the next block.  Some (or significantly all) miners may require a higher fee however those two changes will for the most part take the client and nodes out of the fee decision process (with a negligible mandatory requirement on low priority tx to ensure the network is safe from DDOS attacks).  It will be important for miners to be more open with their fee requirements so that users can make a better decision on what fee (if any) to pay.

  

I try to always pay < 1% in fees.
This is usually not a big problem.