Bitcoin Forum

I was surprised to see 0.26 BTC in fees for one block I mined the other day.

Does blockexplorer (or anybody) keep track of these things?

A short script running getblockbycount revealed that the highest combined fee so far was 6.71 BTC in block 55812
http://blockexplorer.com/b/55812
In more recent times, there were a few blocks with fees above 2BTC. This one is the most recent:
http://blockexplorer.com/b/120528

Great, thanks Raulo!

At this rate, miners will probably receive more than 50 BTC per block after 2013!

Has anything higher been seen lately?

what caused the fees for those particular blocks to be so high?

lots of people paying transaction fees. ACtually it looks like one person in particular move a ton of coins and paid a fee on each movement. Probably forgot to change his tx fee setting (paid almost 10% of the moved coin to fees).

I'm a little unsure as to why anyone would ever pay a fee.

Simple. Makes his transaction more important that others of lesser value. He wants it done and done now!

That doesn't really make any sense. A transaction is confirmed in blocks, and as I see it there is no differentiation between one that pays and one that does not. Unless the discoverer of a block can explicitly state "I don't want to confirm a transaction unless it pays me > xx  BTC in fees" then all transactions will get confirmed at the same rate. Is that the case?

The highest fee a miner has payed for solving a block would probably have to be a girlfriend.

Right now fees don't really determine how fast your transaction gets confirmed I think. But I think in the future when block reward is non-existent, fees will play an important role in determining if your transaction goes fast or slow. Because miners wouldn't want to solve a block that pays almost nothing.

Someone post the script to check this please....

That is exactly the case.  The pool/miner decides what is included in the block.  Currently most miners include all transactions in the block regardless of fee however that is slowly changing.  Eligus pool I believe only includes transactions that include a fee in blocks they mine.

Also blocks have a finite fixed size.  If there are more transactions than the size of the block then all miners must choose which transactions to include.  Obviously they aren't going to drop any "paying" transactions.

Thus the average length of time it takes to confirm you transaction depends on how much of the network is including you in the next block.  If 100% includes you then it will be ~10 minutes.  If 50% includes you then it will be 20 minutes.  If 1% includes you then it will be 16 hours.

Today w/ no fee ~100% of network includes you in next block.
Today w/ a fee ~100% of network includes you in next block.

However that may not be true in the future.  Hashing takes resources and the block reward will continually decline (and eventually become 0).  Mining pools will start to make decisions about how small of a transaction fee they will accept and that will start to differentiate how long various transactions take to confirm.

"Miners" can't force a fee they can simply choose to include a transaction or not include it.  Future version of bitcoin client could even aproximate how long confirmations will take depending on the fee chosen.

There is now a higher transaction fee block than the first response to this thread:

The block who generated the most BTC ever is block 139,896: it generated 66.20996865 BTC!

from the pident factoid (http://pident.artefact2.com/factoids) page.

Another: There are 2,105,813 different addresses in the block chain.

And sadly: Recent blocks generate, in average, 50.06200364 BTC, including transaction fees. (you cheap bastards...)

Actually only 50 BTC were generated, the fee is taken from already existing coins.

That pident factoid link doesnt work anymore.  Is there a new link?

Correct.  However the network could adapt.  If a significant fraction of people started submitting free transactions I would expect that many mining pools would simply only include transactions with a fee (or at least exclude transactions w/o a fee that "should" have one based on mainline client rules).  The larger issue right now is there is no reason for a miner/pool to exclude a transaction w/ any fee (even a single satoshi).  That isn't sustainable. 

Here's the pident thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=32894.0

It looks like he stopped maintaining the site because a version change broke his software. The source code is available, but the main point of the site was to guess which pool found a block.

I find the experimental pident very interesting.
Graphs and charts are very useful an comforable rather then text information.
Thank you for the suggestion.