Bitcoin Forum

If we really want micropayments to work with bitcoin, the transaction fee has to be lower.

It would be amazing to see bitcoin being used to pay $0.01 to read an online article that used to behind a subscription-based paywall.

But even with bitcoin, the fees are too high.  Can they be reduced before mass adoption is achieved to avoid a chicken and egg problem?

0.0001 BTC is now nearly 5 cents. Not too high for most transactions.

You can send transactions without fees but it will take a while before they reach the receipient.

This is 0.5 cents !!!

I don't think fees is too much high its still very low from many other methods

The current default fee in 0.9 is 0.00001 BTC which is half a cent. This changed recently. It's not a lot.

However there are still lots of miners that don't respect the new fee and transactions with that particular fee might be slower.

As for microtransactions, there are other ways to do that. It would be more economical to put lots of small transactions together and make 1 larger transaction out of them. So I'd prefer that sort of thing to be done differently.

I think it is true. Other fees for electron money are XX?? higher than digital currency trading fees...

You technically don't need to pay any fees...


Especially when the transaction size is small (in regards to kb size not amount of BTC)

I also think that it would help if you clarify what a micro payment is, for example paypal I think classes anything under $12 as a micropayment.

The problem doesnt really lie within the protocol the main issue is greedy miners.

Floating fees will also help to keep the transaction fees very low, what you refer to is only an issue if you want to send a cent but the vast majority of the transactions are way above this.

when it comes to media wanting to charge just a penny to read an article the problem is that regular readers whom may at first do free transactions due to low data, will find within a week all of those "change" addresses from previous article purchases are now causing their transactions to include more inputs. so yes an article can be free from fee's initially, but regular readers will find that the more often the spend the more it causes their next transaction to bloat. so please do not just say "its possible to send free tx's" without putting the issue into real life context first.

secondly these media companies that receive many micro transactions thn have the issue of transaction bloat due to trying to move all of the microtransactions.

which means that just buying an article costs the customer on purchase and costs the media company when they want to move their received funds.

this issue is not helping the fredom to move funds. it is incentivising people to hoard funds for many confirms to avoid virgin coin fee's. and avoid spending just to keep funds one one nice and neat pile. purely to avoid data bloat fee's

it is very apparent that Luke JR is greedy and implemented these non freedoms. as he also is trying to get people to use new addresses for every transaction. purely to create bloat.

what also adds to this greedy mindset, is the distancing away from mining is to verify/comfirm transactions in exchange for a bitcoin reward. into an area of knitpicking transactions and ignoring transactions purely to receive bitcoin fastest, not as a reward, but as compensation for wasted electric.

even the bitcoin wiki is admitting that instead of bitcoin being a free system of value exchange, it is a controlled system which is biased against certain transactions, in which the transactor has no freedom to just send a TX, they have to play to miners greedy and ego.


the fundamental idea of bitcoins and the purpose of blocks is for transactions. and as such bitcoin mining pools should not knit pick transactions. and then blackmail people to pay the fee or have their TX's delayed or ignored.

Without disputing any of your points as you make good ones, isnt this where off chain transactions can come into play for a regular reader ? 

Again though the issue is mainly miners in regards to the fee itself, I personally think that 25 bitcoins for creating a block is more than enough reward. Miners arent filing up there blocks as it is and so excluding transactions based on fee sent is silly until there really is a need to give priortiy to fee paying transactions due to ful blocks.

I typically use a 0.00001 BTC fee (one hundredth of a milliBit) for transactions, always works fine. That's about half a ¢ent. And even lower works fine as well. This is not an issue anymore since Bitcoin Core 0.9 (in which the default fee policy was adjusted).

Well in comparison to normal fiat currency transfers we have a pretty low transaction fee. And, you can set the amount yourself so who's complaining?

OP was complaining but hope after reading all this now he satisfied about this

Usually as lower transaction you make the bigger fee you get just like on paypal?

Yes this happen to me in starting days I have many coins from faucets and they took too much fees from my wallet  :(

I think that keeping the fee around 1 cent is okay. There is no need to go lower than that.

If I had some Bitcoins I might complain

^^ that

High-priority transactions in BTC-E charge a transaction fee of BTC0.0005 (Equivalent to $0.25). That is a bit high, I think. Especially when we have to withdraw small amounts like BTC0.01.

What most people fail to take into account, is that right now they are saying they all agree in a transaction fee. Yes it may be .5 cents per transaction right now. But thinking of it in terms of supply/demand. IF everyone is saying the Bitcoin network will 100x or 1000x in volume that will certainly increase the transaction fees needed for miners to mine.

So if you want to just normalize it, lets say transaction fees a few years from now will be 50 cents to 5 bucks per transaction. Which is obviously assuming BTC stays the same price as it is about right now. But at a certain point your transaction fees ARE going to go up, and anything sent through "free" transactions will most likely never get through. Like I have been saying, in the end BTC functions just like a bank. People are creating ETFs for BTC, stock exchanges, insurance programs, "vaults" for storage, loan programs, and all of the SAME EXACT THINGS THAT BANKS/STOCK MARKETS DO.

In the white paper on BTC it is admitted that BTC protocol does require fees once their is no BTC available(assuming people still use it and there is large volume), so miners can be sustained and transactions verified. The only problem is that these fees are going to start going up and hitting a lot sooner than most expect. BTC is becoming banking(due to 3rd parties hi-jacking it). In the end there will be a few large oligarchies who run everything to do with BTC and someone will be able to push through any change they feel like. Just saying.

Quote me now for future reference.

If we really want miners to make money with their mining rigs, the transaction fee has to be higher.

Well, for mining to continue at current profit levels, the halving of the block reward has to be balanced by increase in total transaction fees. I'm not sure the growth by 2017 will match the loss of 12.5 BTC per block then, unless transaction fees increase a lot. I am wondering if we will have some kind of crisis then.

I recall hearing the same exact thing around here in 2012 when the block reward was being cut from 50 BTC to 25 BTC.  Yet, oddly, the transaction fee today is one-tenth what it was back then.

Well, the value of bitcoin also increased tenfold, so the fiat fee remained about the same. More importantly, the fiat value of the block reward increased the same way. So for the crisis to be averted, we have to hope that Bitcoin continues to grow tenfold every couple of years. I'd rather not have to rely on that.

Not really.  Who says the exact amount of computing power used right now is the absolute minimum required to protect the network.  Say the subsidy cut occurred today and lets assume nothing else changes (miners don't become more efficient, avg fee doesn't go up, fiat price doesn't go up, and average number of tx doesn't go up).  Ok then half the miners quit and the network is secured by 3 PH/s instead of 6 PH/s.  Realistically anyone who could 51% attack a 3 PH/s network could do the same to a 6 PH/s network.   3 PH/s puts the possibility of an attack outside the abilities of all but three letter agencies of major nation states and 6 PH/s doesn't materially change that.   Now 30 PH/s or 300 PH/s might change that but not a mere doubling.

I thought it's 60 already not 6 phs

55 PH/s now. I think that he used 6 only as an example. Mining should always stay profitable, because as soon as a portion of miners leave the others get their share (and it's profitable again).

Um, no-one? It's below the minimum.

A 51% attack today would cost under $100m. That's easily affordable by a lot of entities. For comparison, HSBC recently lost over $4,000m in fines for their illegal activities. $100m would be peanuts for them. And that's just a bank. If Russia wanted to retaliate for economic sanctions over Ukraine (estimated to be worth billions), or North Korea wanted to cause problems, or China decided it was serious about wanting to stop its people using Bitcoin, or... any number of entities could do it.

See YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bi2thGzzNSs).

no

halving of the supply output of coins SHOULD be balanced by a demand rise causing a price rise. this in turn causes miners to profit as their coins are worth more. there is no need to subsidise/tax mining pools until 2140

what miners dont realise is that right now, this year mining pool OWNERS keep the fee's along with 1% of the mining reward. ill repeat again MINERS DO NOT PROFIT due to fee's. pool OWNERS do. mining pool owners also keep the altcoin rewards from merge mining

the only way for MINERS to profit is to stop throwing all their bitcoins at FIAT sales. but instead keep the coins, this will create demand and a price rise to compensate them. instead of selling at a loss, shooting themselves in the foot. and asking for subsidies in the form of fee's, which also never reach them in reality

these days mining it not to invest into bitcoin, it is to sell off back to FIAT and invest in banks and electric companies, as thats where all their mining hard work ends up.

if you are a miner and your cashing out every 10 minutes, then you are missing the whole point of why you should be mining.

I am a miner and I disagree.  Maybe after the next halving in two years but not now.  The block reward is plenty.  Sure I want more for my mining, but if you increase it, it will just bring more miners in the end leveling out to where we are now with just higher fees.   

The new minimum fee seems like it is quite fair for both miners and micropayments. 

That's the thing. If you increase the fee, more miners will end leveling it out. If you decrease it (and if mining becomes unprofitable), some will leave and level it out again.

But who does really want micropayments with Bitcoin? Not full nodes, who have to deal with increased bandwidth and storage requirements. Not miners, who have to deal with a higher orphan rate when mining large blocks. The only people who want microtransactions are the ones who want to consume other people's resources without paying for them, ie, freeloading scum. Bitcoin ain't a charity. You want to make transactions, you got to pay the fee. If your transaction is very small in comparison to the fee, that's too damn bad, you got to pay it anyway. Bitcoin is not suitable for microtransactions, never was, never will be.

BS. Even if we make the transaction fee to 100%, the miners will not make profits. If someone increases the transaction fee, then more mining rigs will be bought up, increasing the hash rate. The mining will never be profitable, as long as there are people who are willing to mine at -50% returns (BTW... I have to concede that a lot of mining is done by companies such as BFL and Avalon, using their customers' rigs).

You do realize that all the major pools pay out transaction fees *and* merge mined coins...right?  GHash, BTC Guild, Eligius, and Slush all pay TX Fees.  GHash, BTC Guild, and Eligius pay merge mined coins (Slush does not merged mine, provable by looking at the coinbase for his blocks lacking the mm tags).  Other smaller pools do as well (but I can't speak for certain about which ones, I just track the major ones).

I don't think Discus Fish does, but they're Pay per Share last I checked.  Wouldn't trust Google Translate on a Chinese mining pool's fee system.

Its not too high, It can be reduced  or removed if u want to wait a few hours for a confirmation

It can't really be 'reduced' without the consensus of the nodes and the miners. If you're talking about setting a lower fee than you should according to the reference implementation then that's not really true as it is quite likely to hobble your confirmation times. Trust me sending 0 fee transactions is not the smartest thing to do - if you can't afford 5c (0.5c once reference is adopted) than you really shouldn't be wasting the effort of the network with your tx.

IMO the fees aren't that big. My bank charges ~20 times more every month just for allowing me to have a debit card. I had money sent through paypal and the fee was so big that I'll need few years of paying bitcoin fees to catch up. :D

It's pretty high, yes. Then again, do you really need high-priority transactions? (especially for 0.01 BTC payments?) And more importantly, high priority wire transfers (especially internationally, where "high priority" still means "several days at least") easily cost over $10. I say Bitcoin still wins hands down.

Yeah it's companies that want to charge for microtransactions, not freeloaders.

In terms of fees and speed Bitcoin will always win. If you use WU, you will have a fun time.

Sounds like a really good reason not to use BTC-E.

Sounds like there's room in the market for someone to create a similar competing service with lower fees.

AFAIK BTC-E founders are unknown too...

When BTC is sent to me from faucets, do I pay the transaction fee or does the faucet pay it?

I kind of do see this becoming an issue as it costs me 1 dogecoin to complete a doge transaction.. that isn't even a penny.  There are lots of people on the planet that 5 cents per transaction is actually going to hurt them.

The sender pays fees, not the receiver. I'm not sure if faucets include the fee or not.

Yes; there will always be miners. The problem is that if too many drop out, the network becomes more vulnerable to 51% attacks.

When you say SHOULD, do you mean as a prediction of economic theory, or do you mean morally, or is it merely what you hope will happen? Because I think the 25 BTC per block is too small a fraction of all the coins minted to make much difference to the supply curve, so won't in itself affect the price.

The price may go up anyway, but as I wrote in #23, I wouldn't want to rely on that for the security of the network.

I have .0001 BTCs stuck in my blockchain.info because it wont let me send it to my main account because the transaction fee is too high... guess it will just stay there until BTC reaches 1 million USD per xD