Bitcoin Forum

I notice that when I transfer coins from MtGox to my computer wallet, wait for 6 confirmations, and send to somewhere else, I have to pay 0.0005 everytime, if I wait for a day before sending, I don't have to pay the fee or at least the fee will be reduced.

How many confirmations do I have to wait before the fee is waive ?

And when people use bitcoin services, they typically send coins to such services and such services send back some coins within short period of time, like sdice or bitcoingem, how do they avoid the fee ? is fee optional, just to quicken transaction ?

If it's optional why bitcoin-qt that I'm using does not make it optional.

The code for the Bitcoin-Qt wallet (and some other wallet systems) require a fee if the bitcoin input being used in the transaction is too small and new.  This is done to prevent someone "spamming" the network by sending a large volume of very amounts of bitcoin back and forth among a number of addresses they own.  The protocol itself doesn't require this fee, and some people create their own programs for pushing transactions to the network so they can avoid this fee.  Many of the peers that you connect to may not forward your transaction to the rest of the network and some miners may refuse to include the transaction in any blocks they add to the blockchain without the fee.  This can result in a very long wait for the transaction to finally receive a confirmation.

The general "rule-of-thumb" is that most clients will allow the creation of (and will forward received) transactions without a fee if the outputs are aged at approximately 1 bitcoin*day.  So if you send 1 bitcoin to the wallet, and then wait 1 day you can re-send it without a fee.  If you send 0.5 BTC and wait 2 days, or send 2 bitcoins and wait a half a day, you can resend it without a fee.

I've had otherwise high priority transactions with aged coins and sufficiently large outputs take several hours and many blocks to get their first confirmation. If the reason you are sending coins is at all time sensitive, you want to make sure you include an appropriately sized fee. The Qt-client uses a formula to try to ensure the fee paid is appropriate to the size of the transaction, but sometimes the big mining pools and the Qt-client disagree on what an appropriate transaction fee is. They especially tend to disagree when the fee is zero.

Satoshi Dice includes fees on all of their transactions (even when they just send a single satoshi to let you know you lost). I don't know that it could work anywhere near as well if it did not include fees in outbound transactions.

Where do the fee's taken from Bitcoin transactions go?

Wait, there are transactions fee with the bitcoin currency? Since when was this enacted?

EDIT: I made some research, and It seem like the policy of bitcoin was enacted when it was created, and the transaction fee are low but still must pay the minors. Still, I like bitcoin more than Paypal, because of fast transaction and very low fee (not 2.9%!)

The fee is part of what is supposed to allow mining to continue once the coin generation process has been exhausted. If it wasn't for some level of fees the network would probably collapse right around the time the last coin is minted.