Bitcoin Forum

hi,


are payouts from my rewards in the pools i mine to subject to transaction fees?
ie if i set my payout interval to 0.05 BTC, would this have an adverse affect on my earnings as opposed to setting the payout interval to... 5 BTC?

I don't know of any pool that charges you for withdrawing your balance. Nearly every site (which has fees) takes them automatically from your earnings and that's the only thing you pay for.

Note that if your pool operator pays a 0.01 BTC transaction fee for each withdrawal so his customers get their payments faster, it's rude to make withdrawals of 0.01-0.02BTC even if you are a small time miner.
That's shooting yourself in the foot, instead of waiting for a .10 or .20 balance, you make the operator .01 poorer every time you make tons of small withdrawals

(If it gets abused, that payment method will disappear and you'll get withdrawals slower at zero fee)

If there's no fee and payouts are sent out as-is, then the pool OP prob. is fine even with single bitcent withdrawals

I wasn't gonna use 0.01, it was just to make the problem more clear.

Note that if the pool operator uses sendmany to send out payments, he'll probably only spend a small fee for everyone. In other words, he could probably send 0.01 btc to 12 different people in one transaction, and only spend 0.005 in transaction fees.

Take this transaction for example: http://blockexplorer.com/tx/f22f604f542d82f84b1bdb22ae01c09a4c5117596494b38562b96a6e71d81097 (http://blockexplorer.com/tx/f22f604f542d82f84b1bdb22ae01c09a4c5117596494b38562b96a6e71d81097)

There are lots of tiny outputs in one transaction, yet only 0.005 in fees are spent because it's all one transaction.

But those are only processed by large pools out of good will and compassion towards poorer members of the BTC community, which is possible due to the (still relatively) low difficulty of creating new coins. That's not going to last forever.

Some hosts like Eligius already reject big transactions with low or zero fees. That will likely become more & more common in the upcoming months and years, esp. with bigger pools like slush/deepbit who have to pay for the bandwidth of free & near-free transfers of other people.

Of course in the context of the original question, a pool operator always has the option of including their own payouts in their own blocks, and not pay any fees.