Bitcoin Forum

From http://bitminter.com/block/btc/000000000000029b07f1093ad8bea755a4f30419d79118612d741f0ba2f860d7


If BitMinter didn't pay out the income from transaction fees that would be like a 10+% fee for mining this block.

What is zero fee? Can you even determine zero fee for PPS?

Are you paying a 10% fee at your pool?

At BitMinter we pay out all the coins that come in. You can choose whether you want to donate some back. That is zero fee.

Of course not every block has 5 BTC in fees. But the transaction fees are steadily rising: http://blockchain.info/charts/transaction-fees

Something to consider when you think about mining fees.

 :)

DrHaribo - out of interest, do you maximise your Tx fees? From those charts I see an average Tx fee of around 0.17 btc per block - do you know what your average is?

Tx fees are set to become a larger part of a miners income. They will increase as bitcoin is more widely adopted as a means of exchange, and will make up an even larger proportion of earnings as the block reward halves. If miners don't mine at a pool that passes on the Tx then they need to make sure they're getting some benefit in exchange or should move to a pool that does pass Tx fees on.

I think he was just using that block as an example.  

Fees run about 20 BTC per day (looking @ 7 day average) compared to about 5 BTC per day at the begining of the year.  There is really nothing that can be done to maximize that other than no rejecting paying txs.

That works out to only ~0.14 BTC per block or ~0.3%.  The larger point is that fees will continue to grow as a % of miner's revenue and miner's should be aware what is happening to that revenue.   0.3% may not seem like a lot but lets fast forward to January.  Hypothetically the block reward is now 25 BTC, the avg fee per tx has doubled, and the tx volume has tripled.  That puts fees in the 3% to 3.5% range.  As time increases the issue becomes more relevant. 

Congrats on BitMinter being the largest pool that charges no fee AND pays out all fees collected.  The true "no fee" option.

Sure, I was just wondering if he was providing his miners with extra reward by trying to include as many high value Tx as possible.
I didn't realise that - I'd thought pools could select which Tx they included in the block and assumed they could prioritise based on Tx fee - incorrect?


That's pretty much what I was getting at although I wasn't game enough to put a prediction on it. Fast forward another four years and miners will be depending on Tx fees almost as much as the block reward.


And given the steady increase in Bitminter's piece of the network hashrate, many other people are starting to feel the same way. They're where Ozcoin was at not so long ago, with a similar steady rise in percentage of network hashrate.

We try to maximize our share of the daily 0.3% fee income. But yeah, 10% income from fees is rare, I was just using it to make a point. :P

Currently you lose about 0.3% if you don't get tx fees and about 0.5% if you don't get namecoins. Still only 0.8% but after the reward halving it will be much higher and could make 3% mining at Deepbit seem cheap.

All the more significant when block reward halves.  This is a good selling point.

Ozcoin is now paying txn fees to DGM miners :D

Good stuff :)

https://en.bitcoin.it/w/images/en/e/e3/Total_bitcoins_over_time_graph.png

So by 2029 when each block only rewards ~1.5 BTC, TX fees will make up most of the incentive to continue mining?

Maybe. Or perhaps the exchange rate will be $100/BTC!

I though more than 5 pools paid out txns to miners
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Comparison_of_mining_pools

Bitlc.net pays tx fees as well, although it's not listed on that page as doing so.

Only the finest pools pay tx fees. It's an exclusive club.  ;D

++  ;D

Hmm, no abc pool in the list, I wonder what could that mean  ;D

The exchange rate isn't very relevant for this. If the miners get paid fewer coins for each block and transactions stay the same or higher in bitcoins then they will have less protection compared to today.

Miner's costs are in USD (or EUR,etc).  For protection what matters is the real cost to attack the network.  IF miners are compensated 10x as much then more hashing power will be added and the cost to attack the network will increase.

No, what matters is cost vs benefit/profit for the attacker.

Yeah and unless you know of any fixed BTC cost mining hardware or flat rate BTC power companies the attackers cost are also in USD/EUR.  So the net gain has to be measured against the cost to the attacker which is primarily in fiat currencies.   If it cost an attacker $200M to attack the network then the reward has to be more than $200M.

The gain will be in bitcoins, so if the bitcoins are worth more in fiat to the miners they will be worth just as much more in fiat to the attackers. Duplicating a 1000 BTC transaction will be much cheaper compared to the gain if the miners only get 1.5 BTC from a block.

And if the value of the BTC has increased tenfold it's because bitcoins have become more popular. With popularity comes more valuable transactions, more opportunities to take advantage of a double spend attack for those who want to scam, and more incentives for companies and organizations which don't want Bitcoin to succeed.

The more chains get added onto the typical miner's list of chains all merged-mined at once the more resilient this all should become, as more chains reaching high levels of difficulty should result in more confidence in all of them, more money coming in to miners as even if money moves out of one chain it might well merely move to another instead of out of the cryptochain world completely, and the prospect of co-ordinating attacks on all chains at once might look more complex too. Maybe also depending on the niches various types of chain end up addressing the perception of what kinds of people you would be going up against by attacking might change. (For example if some nuclear labs use a blockchain for some weird reason or something suddenly you are looking at hmm do we want all the powers behind such a chain also coming after us not just the weirdo libertarians who use bitcoin?)

-MarkM-

so anyway
http://blockchain.info/block-index/311449/0000000000000412cb93f5cceceebdd6bec88d5db691a17a823287c47713d2cf
Dunno what broke, but for occasions like these....
worth mining on a pool paying txn fees out?

Wow, 154.68299211 BTC is pretty decent income for a block.

If it had been on a pool that keeps transaction fees that would be almost a 68% fee. Yes, avoiding such steep fees is probably wise.  :D

Yeah, but did you include the other 2000 blocks that have a fee in your calculations? :)

sorry, what 2000 blocks?
what calculation?