Bitcoin Forum

Call me silly but I wonder who it was that decided on the value of transaction fees. I tried to send some BT to someone else and the fee wanted was more than the transaction amount. Now I now that the theory is it is to stop DoS type attacks but I know that techies can spam the channels without using the BitCoin client so it seems to me it is just a way to force us to pay funds into the mining pools. Who will process the funds when the mining pools stop as the coins become prohibitive to mine? Not me I switch my cleint off now as I don't get any of the fees.  It seemed reasonable to have a low fee to send your funds immediately but what about those that are happy to wait and want to spend as little as possible on admin costs aka bank charges. Finally, when everything settles down and BT comes to a value where 0.000001 is the cost of an item, say a UK penny, it is possible, then a 0.01 admin fee is going to be £100. A bit steep wouldn't you say? Why isn't it say 1% max of the value being sent.

I would have posted this in the correct forum but I'm a newbie. Only another 4 and a half hours to go.  ::)

You are silly :)

The fee has been coming down in price ever since bitcoin was created.

In another few years, the developers will have hard coded in a much lower recommended fee.

Note however that no fees are forced upon any user.

Until recently the default transaction fee for expensive (i.e. spammy) transactions was 0.01. If that is the transaction fee you are talking about, you are probably using an older version of the bitcoin client and should upgrade POST HASTE.

The current version of the client asks for a 0.0005 transaction fee on spammy transactions, not 0.01.

And that transaction fee will be lowered again, it's just a matter of time.

And it's not even a mandatory fee!  It's coded in the default bitcoin client to ask for that fee because for an expensive transaction that the network views as potentially-spammy, the fee will make sure the transaction occurs. Without the fee, it may or may not be accepted by various nodes and the transaction could succeed or fail. The transaction fee is to make sure your transaction works. But it is NOT required, it is just a default in the main client. You can use another bitcoin client, or a forked version of the main client, or fork it and change it yourself, to use a different transaction fee amount or even to send all transactions with no fees at all, IF YOU WANT. Just be aware, your transactions may or may not be accepted by the network.  If you try to send someone 0.00000001 btc with no transaction fee, it's probably not going to go through. But it's your choice to attempt it if you want.

Guys,

Thanks for that. Much appreciated.