Bitcoin Forum

What Android app allows no fee transactions?
Is it risky? 

Everything uses a fee, but if you are with android check out blockchains app.

Pay the miner 5 cents or wait days for your transaction to process.

If I send a tiny amount with no fee, will it be lost? I don't mind to wait days, but can the transaction be ignored?

No it wont get lost, but will take ages to get to the receiver address.

Would the receiver get any notification/confirmation at starts? I understand that the final confirmation would take days but would there be any preliminary notification/confirmation?

paying fee is good
your transaction would go up to hours instead up to 24 hours or even more

It is possible, though unlikely, that your transaction will never be included in a block. Payment of fees is voluntary, but so is including your Tx. 

Could such "unincluded in a block" transaction, be deducted from the payer wallet while not shown in the payee wallet? Meaning that funds would be lost in a "black hole"?

If your wallet keeps re-broadcasting the transaction, then it's a pain in the ass to get your money out of this semi-black hole. If not, then it should be returned to you in a few days.
I mean, seriously, just add the fee, it's 0.0001. 5 cents.

This. It is a hassle to undo an abandon transaction. Way more trouble than $0.05.

I've sent transactions before with 0 fee and still had them there within an hour. You just have to make sure the amount you're sending is 0.01 BTC or more and that the transaction size is under 10 KB.

He's a newbie, and he won't be able to calculate tx size before sending it.

You really don't have to though. I think it's around 75 inputs + 1 output (just to be safe). So if you're always getting inputs of 1 mBTC, you should be able to send 0.075 BTC in one transaction before hitting that cap. It's of course a bit deeper than this, but you should be safe with that.

He probably has no idea as to what inputs and outputs are anyway. Also, don't forget the change, so it won't be 1 output.

True. A better idea then: Coinbase! No worrying about fees since they pay for them, :p.

Not that safe, it's still an web-based wallet. I recommend people to not use web-based wallets.
P.S: Nice post count that we're racking up.

So Bitcoin is not suitable for micropayments?

For absolute newbies, I think web wallets are safer than self-hosted (as many people have viruses and don't know, or don't know how to back up their stuff). Both are going to have their risks, of course, but web wallets are more easily used.

Then you should only use blockchain.info, since you are in control of your private keys.


Bitcoin IS suitable for micropayments. But if you mean micropayments as in a tenth of a cent, then no, since no one needs that.
If you pay 1 US Dollar to someone in Australia, he/she would receive like $0.60. If you use Bitcoin, he/she receives $0.96. Electronic Fiat is even worse for micropayments.

It's fine for payments of above something like 10c. Otherwise you'd have a fee that's quite large in proportion to what your sending - however that's to be expected, the network was never designed to handle crap loads of midget payments. In reality I can't think of a reason you'd need to send less than 10c except to gamble but that should be done off-chain to avoid blockchain spam.

Pretty much this right here. 10 cents though would come with a fee that (right now) is 5 cents, or 50%. $10 would still be 5 cents. So really it's still a pretty small fee.

Does it matter if I define a fee of 0.00005 or 0.00001? Would both transactions be treated as "no fee" transactions? 

The fee (I forgot what the lowest is, but I know it was changed) would be present, so no, it wouldn't be a no-fee one. It would just be less of a fee.

No fee would literally be 0. For example, you are sending 1 BTC, that's all. Not 1.0000001, but 1.0.

There is a minimum, but I can't remember either.
OP, I have 2 questions for you:
Are you really that concerned about paying a few cents for a transaction? Don't you realize how high bank and credit card fees are?

A lot of people don't realize the high credit card fees because we don't "pay" them (at least not transparently). Items cost more as a result, but most people aren't aware of that.

1 - use web wallets, like coinbase, ask the receiver to use too. Think be too paranoid for few cents is not worth.
2 - send many transactions at once
3 - use altcoins. Litecoin fee is 0.001(about one cent). Others altcoins have lesser fees(ex: Doge, typically 1 doge(about 100 satoshis) for transaction).

You are right, BTC is not good for small transactions, and for me is where ALTS have their space. At this point FIAT be worse is no excuse, if we have have even better options around there for such king of transactions

If you bundle up transactions, fees will be higher.

i, say, I send 100 0.001 outputs via separate transactions will be the fee higher than send all 100 outputs at once?

For my experience won't be, people with automated systems do that(ex: Ritz, Primedice, that guy that pays you for playing minecraft, etc...).

Of course that send 100 transactions still will be more expensive than send one, no matter if you group them or not.

Ive seen some transactions without a miner fee take several months to process. Trust me it is worth the $0.05 to get a conformation quickly.

The fees only go up because the transaction size does. I think it's around 1 input and like 7-8 outputs per KB or so (don't quote me on that though). So you could:

1) Send 8 people each 0.001 BTC separately and pay 0.0008 BTC in fees (8x0.0001)
2) Send 8 people each 0.001 BTC in one bundle and pay 0.0001 BTC in fees (1x0.0001)

The reason why the pools and such pay bigger fees is because they have tons of outputs, each increasing the size of the transaction. In the above scenario, for the same 0.0008 BTC you spent sending 8 people their own, you could have done 8*8 or 64 people in bundles of 8.

If you are trying to make micropayments as small as a few cent, you shouldn't use bitcoin, at least not on-chain tx.

What is "not on-chain tx"?

The easiest way is to use coinbase (and ask the receivers to use coinbase as well).
For the details, you can take a look at the page.
http://blog.coinbase.com/post/57483182558/you-can-now-send-micro-transactions-with-zero-fees

A TX is considered "not on chain" or "off chain" when its just internal. If you have an account with company X and they hold 3 BTC for you. I have one there as well and want to send you 2 BTC they can just change the BTC in my account by -2 and yours by +2. Just by changing an internal spreadsheet or database. If you now want to transfer 5 BTC from.company X to your private wallet there must be an "on chain" (as in stored on the blockchain) TX.

Off chain is meaning  "Web wallet". Right? And that has its own risk.

Not really. Indeed, shorena has given you a very good explanation, but let me try again.

Say, if Alice and Bob both have an account on Coinbase, and Alice want to send Bob 1 BTC.
Alice could do so with a open transaction (just like every other transaction you see in the blockchain).
Or, Alice could do a off-chain transaction on Coinbase (Alice's account balance decreases by 1 BTC, Bob's account balance increases by 1 BTC, no actual bitcoin transaction is created, and the whole transaction can be done instantly and internally within Coinbase system).

Just out of reference, with the newest implementation fees should drop to 0.5c so it basically means that txs are pretty damn cheap.


In a sense it is a web wallet. Anyone who has control over a private key with Bitcoin associated with the public address are in control over those coins as well so unless you have the private key there is also a risk someone will steal those coins. You won't be able to avoid off-chain transactions (pretty common for gambling) but you can minimise the amount you have there (ie don't put everything you on onto JD).

Please explain

In theory, you're correct. The problem is that a lot of the miners and pools are still using older versions of the Bitcoin client. There was a thread about this, saying that like 70% of them still haven't upgraded in like a year or so and so are far behind as it is. On top of this, the miners/pools can apparently set their own requirements for fees and decline transactions that don't match what they want.

You are correct, we need some way to force nodes to update, since they play a huge part in the bitcoin network. I guess you could set up your own node, but that's just a bit difficult and unnecessary.

Setting up your own node wouldn't do any good, either, unless you happened to mine a block. The only people whose daemons really matter (as far as I understand it) are the ones that are minting. And since a couple people are minting the majority of blocks, it's them that need to change (or not, depending on how they feel).

But if your node is directly connected to a pool's one, wouldn't it accept your transaction and broadcast it to the specific pool?

It broadcasts it, yes. As far as I'm aware, there are no issues with the broadcasting part. It doesn't ensure it'd get into a block, though. You can test this by sending a really small transaction without a fee. It will be broadcast to all the nodes (and even show up on Blockchain.info within seconds). But it will take days to get in a block, if it ever does. Basically it works like this:

1) You send a transaction from your client or a web wallet
2) Transaction is broadcast to all the nodes to share
3) When a pool is minting, it chooses what transactions it wants to include
4) If a pool mints a block, the transactions it was including are now "confirmed"

The problem isn't with the broadcasting, it's with the pools/miners not packaging them into a block due to not being valuable enough.

That's because the miners choose not to accept it, that has nothing to do with the Bitcoin Core version. Also, don't use "mint", use "mine".

Mining, minting, either way it's the creation of more coins, :p.

I was under the impression that the client is what determines the minimum fees for mining blocks?

It is actually risky, not with the app but with the transaction fees. Transactions that does not include a fee may never confirm depending on the factors. There are a list of factors: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction_fees#Sending

You should always send a fee. It's not very much and helps the mining community.

If it doesn't confirm, though, you should be able to reverse the transaction (or, rather, delete it locally) and re-send with the fee. I think some clients (Electrum and MultiBit?) automatically do this after like 48h.

That is technically incorrect, you cannot "reverse" a transaction. It just gets dropped out of the memory pool (a database of unconfirmed transactions), and, if it doesn't get rebroadcasted, then you get your coins back.

It may not be called a reversal but that's technically what it is. You broadcasted a transaction, then reversed it. It just wasn't official yet.

Fees below the min for relaying are treated by default nodes as no different than zero.  For v0.8x that is 0.1 mBTC and for v0.9x that is 0.01 mBTC.  Paying a fee greater than zero but less than the min to relay is pointless.

 I was completely unaware of that. Wouldn't it be more efficient to just organize based on fee paid, such that 5 satoshi would be above 1 satoshi, rather than treating them as equals?

It could however then it would almost guarantee that free tx would never be included in blocks.  Instead miners devote a set amount of space to high priority txs (relayable without a fee) and a set amount of space for paying txs and a min fee.   

This might be 50KB, 350KB, and 0.1 mBTC as an example.
So transactions they are ranked by priority (fees if any are ignored) and the top 50KB worth are included in the fee portion of the block.
The transactions are then ranked by fee (per KB) and the top 350KB that are over 0.1 mBTC are included in the block.

You might say "what prevents a miner from just setting the min fee to 1 satoshi per KB?" the answer is nothing however miners rely on other nodes to relay transactions and a low priority tx with a fee below 0.1mBTC (0.01 mBTC for v0.9+) will just be dropped.  The miner will never even learn about it.  Without modification the tx would be dropped by the miners own node as well.   So there is no reason for a miner to set their fee requirement below the min required to relay.

That makes sense. I didn't think about people doing 1 satoshi to kick out the freebies (and essentially get free transactions still).

Is it possible to see what nodes are accepting x minimum payments? Like can we somehow see (based on the blockchain and mined blocks) what the transactions are that each major pool/miner is going after?

Mine was automatically rebroadcasted for 11 days already, using multibit's wallet. It is more effective to double spend it rather than wait.