Bitcoin Forum

Hi,

I am new to bitcoin world

I never understand why we pay miner fee.

You pay a few satoshi to reward the miners which make your transactions secure in the bitcoin network. (making sure it wont be double spend etc)

Well why else would they mine if they wern't getting paid for it? Would you do work for free? No.

As the old saying goes:  There's no free lunch.

:)


Unless you are doing something for charity, everyone expects to be compensated for their time/effort/costs.

Transactions need to be included in a block by a miner to actually get a confirmation and thus go through. Since there is a limit on size of a block that most miners respect, the number of transactions is limited as well. Your transaction thus "competes" with other transactions.

A miner can choose which transactions they will include in blocks. Nearly always, they will seek to maximize their fees, so they choose transactions with fees. The bigger the transaction, the high the fee needs to be for a miner to be "convinced" to use limited space in a block for that transaction as opposed to a few smaller ones.

Simply: It's because of human nature ... NOTHING IS FOR FREE ... so, to keep thigs going right, we have to pay FEE   ;)

BTW, welcom to Bitcoin, and don't worry you are paying fees for years, don't even know about.

You must include a fee to your transaction to give the miners incentive to include your TX on their block. The miners are providing a service of keeping the blockchain secure.

The amount of the fee is very small, generally only ~$0.06 for a TX which is much smaller then using most other payment methods.

You include the fee for the very same reason Visa and Mastercard charge a 3% to their merchant customers for using their services.  It supports the Bitcoin network.  Currently most of the support is from the block subsidy of 25BTC, but that amount will keep decreasing until all 21 million BTC are mined.  Fees will become more and more significant in payment to miners.

Why? Because we need to incentivize miners to run the network!

At this moment, there is a block reward of 25 btc, and also they do include free tx as long as your tx has high enough transaction priority.
Check https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction_fees#Reference_Implementation for details.


But, the block reward will be halved every 4 years approximately, and in the end there will be no block reward and just tx fee for the miners. :)

In addition to what everyone else has said, the transaction fee also serves as a deterrent to transaction spam. It inherently prevents malicious entities from bloating the blockchain with dust and unnecessary transactions. That, by itself, helps secure the network from an attack that is more easily orchestrated than the misunderstood "51% attack."

After 140 years, the mining rewards for each block reward would be very very small. Since the reward is so small, there is no point for any miners to mine for the network. If no one mines, no transaction would be confirmed. To prevent this unlikely case of happening, fees are paid so miners can at least have more than the small block reward, encouraging miners to mine.

You may refer to the section 6 of the bitcoin white paper. https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

There are still some transactions which qualify as free transactions.
But then again, you cannot expect everything in this world to be free.

There's actually more incentive currently, obviously, in the block reward. But eventually, if bitcoin catches on, tx fees will make a pretty penny.

why pay a miner fee? well, miners could send millions of dollars for you for mere pennies. try doing that using a bank/financial institution! there's got to be some incentive for miners to include your transactions.

Are you talking about pool fee?

Probably not. He said about paying miner fee. He can choose a 0% fee pool if he wants. But miners fee per transaction is almost needed for most transactions.

As others had said, transaction fee is a fee to pay miners to include your transaction into the blockchain. But there are ways to send a free transaction. If you have enough bitcoin, something like 0.1 btc, you can leave them idle and accumulate maturity. Read about it on the wiki, I am still researching.

It also depends on the size. If the size is too big, you will have to still pay a miner fee, no matter how old your coin is.  The size is affected by the amount of inputs and/or outputs.

Don't attempt to send transactions for free unless you're sending many hundreds of btc, even then I would include a small fee. If you send 0.1 without a fee it will most likely not be accepted and remain in void space for a few days, untouchable and not received by the person you sent it to. Always add between 0.0001 and 0.01 depending on how urgent it is and the size of the transaction.