Bitcoin Forum

We are FORCED to pay a tax upon every transaction, and they say Bitcoin doesn't have any taxes? That's just pure crap. Taxation is unconstitutional theft via armed extortion. In Bitcoin's case, it's unavoidable, and is without the armed extortion (YOU ARE FORCED TO PAY).

I pay zero fee TXs all the time and they get confirms.
The Constitution only applies to the government.
Nobody is armed forcing you to pay TX fees.

True, but paying at least a  small txn fee helps the protocol.

ARMORY forces me to pay the ridiculous fee!

How? The protocol says I don't have to pay a fee for my aged coin TXNs to be relayed.

Try paying a satoshi to one of your alternative wallets with a 0.00000000 BTC fee

Don't use Armory, then.

Even Bitcoin-qt forces it, or so I heard

Sending only "a satoshi" harms the protocol, fee or no fee. Don't do that.

There are plenty of wallets that don't force you to pay a fee. Or if you have the skill, download the Armory source code and remove the fee requirement.

Are you serious? That is so--

Wait a minute, I can hire someone in the services sub-forum to do that for me

You are not FORCED to pay anything.

You are not even FORCED to use bitcoin.

You are welcome to use bitcoin if you like, and you are welcome to pay any fee (or no fee at all if you like).

Equally, the peers on the network are not FORCED to relay your transaction if they don't want to.

They are welcome to relay your transaction if they like, and they are welcome to ignore your transaction if they like.

Equally, the miners are not FORCED to include your transaction in their blocks.

They are welcome to include your transaction if they like, and they are welcome to leave your transaction for some other miner to include in their block if they like.

Isn't it great how NOBODY is FORCED to do any of these things with bitcoin.

There is no fee if you use certain services. And fees are good for the current services.

You can make a tx fee nothing, you can determine what fee you want to send, but some miners will ignore your transactions if they are too small. If you paste it straight into Blockchain.info I think it might get mined in a few blocks even with no fee. Some pools are more liberal and pickup any transactions, some are more strict and only take transactions that have good tx fees.

Where does this come from?  If it is forced, when and which law? First lawful and then forced.

Its not forced OP. You simply need to wait 1-2 days for it to process.

There is no legit reason why you would want to do this. Sending this kind of TX takes up other people's resources while you are not engaging any kind of commerce.

Even the laxo trade spam TXs are paying huge amounts of TX fees to the tune of ~.048 on some of them.

If you want to use bitcoin and not pay any TX fees then you can engage in off-chain transactions, although you would need to trust your money to be held by some other third party

really 4 cents per tx is not that bad of a fee considering all the electricity and everything used to keep the network up and running... i dont mind the tx fee's alot better than bank fee's and overdraft fee's ande taxes and blah blah blah it goes on and on when the gov't gets their hands on a peice of ur money they take some one before u get it take some out when u spend it...

without fee you may never reach destination wallet or it may take like 7 days or so

This is not actually a tax that you are paying. You are paying for a service (the miners including your TX in the block they find) and like any other service you receive you should should pay for it.

As it has been said many times above, at the present time you can send a TX without a fee and still have the TX confirm quickly assuming that all outputs are at least .01 and the size of the TX (in kb) is small.

Another point to make is that if you are spending an "average" amount of money (I would consider a $10 transaction to be average) then the TX fee of ~$0.04 is very small.

Is that you, Mr. G? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GUqiNbZlBA

Tax is necessitated by a broken system with no risidual benefits... Tx fees are to use a service to provide benefit. different things.

You can always lower it, but without your transaction is going to take quite a while to confirm.

I'm with ya.  I mean, having to pay $0.04 to send a $20,000 wire instantly from the convenience of your home, without any banks, forms or questions?  That's just ridiculous.

heh.

That really makes sense

Well this ill researched rant is a steaming pile of poo isn't it.

Nowhere in the core protocol does it FORCE you to pay any transaction fees. But likewise nowhere in the protocol does it FORCE miners to include your transactions into their blocks.

Sit down in a quiet room and think about that for five minutes.

how ?

people may not know.. i use Multibit and it forces a fee that is NOT cheap !

if i want to send $500,000 worth of BTC it would cost me 0.0001 BTC
and if i want to send 0.0002 BTC it costs me 0.0001  BTC
..not good !

the cost of sending the occasional small amount is bullshit !
and i don't want to hear any excuses about it bloating the block chain or something.
if sending around small amounts is a problem then fix it .

edit:
and guys don't forget that guys abuse what is popular with a strange hold.
if the top 3 wallets enforce a fee then no.. actually YOU sit down and "think about it" lol

Bitcoin is not a free service.
It's a product that must compete with the marketplace, and be exceptional vs. its competitors.
The transaction fees are a necessary component to keep our infrastructure growing.

The beauty of bitcoin:  If there is something you'd like change, go change it.
Create an off-chain small transaction service.

Then, you get to set the rules and charge whatever you like.

Fix what?  The tx fee helps cover resources, not the amount you're sending.  It takes the EXACT same amount of resources to send 500 BTC versus 0.0002 BTC, so why should the tx fee be any different?

I dont know why u have problem with tx fee, what I have problem is the middleman overcharging to exchange btc to fiat.  I have to pay WU and the middleman to collect the fiat which really sucks.

Because certain people are more interested in dreaming how rich they will become instead of learning how bitcoin actually works.

Every transaction that is included inside a block has a cost involved to include that transaction. Who pays for that cost?
We have 3 choices:

1) Miners are FORCED to included transactions, absorbing the cost themselves.
2) Users are FORCED to included transaction fees to pay for the cost.
3) Nobody is FORCED to pay the cost. Users give an incentive to miners to include their transaction. Miners may do it for free or meet somewhere in the middle, so both pay half.

Bitcoin uses option 3.

Not sure about you, but I for one would avoid those like the plague unless they have had a crap ton of vetting as well as having their identity well known. Far too many off-chain "wallet" system scams have been seen over the years.

@OP: When the block rewards eventually run out, what incentive do miners have to continually mine blocks and confirm transactions? Fundamentally, people won't do anything without some sort of reward for their work - and you expect miners to do so for free (actually at a loss if you count electricity).

The market would prove that a small transaction fee is well worth the security of being part of the chain.
I'm almost certain of it.

It's $0.04 right now, but when Bitcoin is worth 100k, the transaction fee would be worth $4,000

The lack of knowledge on this thread is mind blowing.
http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-core-floating-transaction-fees/

If you want to pay 0 tx fees (which I don't recommend), I have three words for you:

createrawtransaction
signrawtransaction
sendrawtransaction

The power is in your hands.

I accidentally sent a 0 fee transaction yesterday.
https://blockchain.info/tx/da3d67ff0e582dcb03cc66e7f97faebd309c0bddb369089d22e5d6046aac8903

I was testing out a shopping cart API and must have clicked NO when my wallet begged me to add a fee.

It took around 24 hours to get through.

Seriously, what's the rush? It's not like I'm paying for emergency services (which by the way, are not feasible to pay for using Bitcoin and is therefore the reason Bitcoin can never replace fiat)

use Electrum and set zero fees
you risk to lose your bitcoins

Sounds like you should probably just stick with Western Union.

I should be utterly worried to hear what you have to say when all the 21 million coins have been mined

You can't lose your coins that way.

When bitcoin price is more expensive, we need some altcoins for trading in smaller values.
Currently bitcoin transaction fee seems cheap because bitcoin price is low.
Imagine bitcoin transaction fee when bitcoin is 10k and above.

Are you aware that the customary transaction fee has been reduced multiple times in the past as the exchange rate has risen?

Is there some reason that you think the customary transaction fee will never change again for as long as bitcoins continues to exist?  That seems like a rather silly assumption.

No problem, and there's no coercion involved.  People who will perform the service of mining for you will do so for a fee.  However, you are free to perform the service of mining yourself if you don't want to pay that fee.  Or you are free to not use Bitcoin.  You could even run your own alternative blockchain if you wanted, with your own rules.

The sky's the limit!  Thank Satoshi and many others for providing all of this for you for free!

Nobody is entitled to get their way at the expense of other people.

It's a great way to live!

This is not true.. you can have your miners do your transactions for no fee.

BTC0.0002 is about 7.6¢. You can't even find a gumball machine anymore that takes less than a quarter. Why are you trying to send such a small amount?

If you don't like the fee policy Multibit enforces, don't use Multibit.  There are plenty of other options that'll let you set whatever transaction fee you want.


CheapSweep (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=128388.0) uses those to combine lots of small inputs into a single, larger output.

Ok so you want to be free to spam the blockchain? You have fundamentally misunderstood A) Freedom (Free Markets), B) The purpose of the TX fee, and C) How you harm the network by creating asinine transactions like sending 1 satoshi.

Tax is a time-based penalty of ownership. Bitcoin transaction fees are not time-based, they are a one-off expense. In fact, the protocol gives preference to "stagnant" Bitcoin transactions and allows for lower transaction fees. There is no taxation penalty for holding Bitcoin. Hold it a year, hold it a day, and when you go to spend it you're stuck with an independent fee.

Just something I thought of while reading through the tread.

I understand that newcomers to bitcoin is often frustrated by the fees, I know I was. The first bitcoins a newcomer usually get is those from faucets and if you really go for it it is possible to make around 50,000 satoshi or even double that from the faucets in a day.

Many then use these coins to 'play' around with to test how things work etc.. but then run into the 10,000 satoshi fees which makes out a very large percentage of their 'faucet' coins even though its true value is negligible if measured in fiat.

I never really used the testnet version of bitcoin except for the short period while testing the new MyCelium version. Should newcomers not maybe be shown how to play around on/with the testnet where they can pass around coins to their hearts content and by doing so get a true feel for how it actually works?

I'm still a newcomer myself so sorry if this idea sounds a bit daft, just something I thought about.

$0.04 is a BIG tax huh? You pay 4 cents and you can send millions of dollars across the world for FREE! Think about it.

Test net is available to everyone.

Some time back, new registrants to this forum were limited to posting in the 'Newcomers' section (though they could read the entire forum). This gave a handy place for noobs to learn these basic concepts before wading out and embarrassing themselves by spewing nonsense on the rest of the forum.

Of course, noobs _could_ continue to learn these basics in the place most suited for such discussions. But they must feel insulted, or too self-aggrandized, or something.

Transaction fees support the network they are needed?

You are not forced, you dont have to pay a transaction fee. But by not paying a fee you may not got your transaction processed until a miner who is kind enough to process transactions for free allows your transaction in a block.

You're not forced. You're welcome to mine your own blocks. You can get to work with a pencil and paper here => http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3dqhixzGVo

You don't have to pay the fee, I never do and my transactions always clear. Are all of you guys too scared to even try sending a feeless tx? Cause mine always work

This was a great troll.

Best reply by far....  ;D

Ah, so because you don't want to pay a few pennies, miners around the world should use their electricity and hardware to do your Tx for free? I assume you know that all things cost money and that someone has to pay. If so, why should someone else pay your bills?

If I put up a sign that says you must do something, that doesn't actually mean you MUST do it.  It just means that's my opinion.

In this case, there's nothing forcing you to include a transaction fee.  There are numerous alternatives documented on this thread.

The transaction fee logic implemented by Armory matches that of the Bitcoin Core client itself.  If you were to include a fee lower than the fee there, the transaction will be DOA when you try to broadcast it.  The Bitcoin network would never see it.  Therefore, if you want your transaction to be accepted by the network you really must include that fee.

The fee does not go to Armory or even Bitcoin Core developers.  The fees are set and collected by the miners that keep the network secure.  We simply must follow those fees, knowing that just about anyone can be a miner and thus there is built-in competition to keep fees low.

In this case, your fee is higher than normal, probably due to your transaction combining lots of inputs, and being very large in size (in terms of bytes, not BTC).  This is a defensive mechanism of the network, to make it expensive to fill up the blockchain with lots of data.  Unfortunately, most of the time you have no control over this parameter and you simply must follow it.  Most of the time it's negligible compared to the tx size, but not always.  This is one reason people believe that Bitcoin won't be good for microtransactions, because the cost of those transactions (in terms of fee) exceeds the value of the transactions themselves.

Actually, that is not necessarily true. If you are getting the message that you "must" pay specifically "0.001" that is probably an indication that your version of Armory is out of date. 0.001 was the old standard min fee, it's now 0.0001. Upgrade to the latest of Armory and you will save 90% on your taxes.

Another thing that might be lost in translation on this thread is that Armory should be allowing you to send transactions for free whenever the network will allow it. If not, your transaction outputs are probably not old enough or big enough to earn them a free trip.

Hey, I wasn't actually expecting you to read this, or actually go as far as responding to it  ;D ;D

Armory's great, in fact, it's been the only client I use!

Needs to be a pop-up ad

There are plenty of TXs that are rebroadcast by the nodes that include less then the "required" fee. Individual TX fee policies are set by the miners who are solo mining and the pools that the other miners are mining on behalf of. If a miner wanted to include a TX that includes less then the "required" fee then they can do this and their block will confirm assuming that it would not otherwise be orphaned and does not contain any invalid TXs in the block

No one forces you to pay to fees.

If you want to do a transaction without fees you totally can. It just may take a little longer to confirm, but it will eventually go through.

Well, if you think that Armory is enforcing unfair fees, then you can switch to a different wallet.

Each wallet has a different approach to fees. An example is that Bitcoin-QT has a compulsory 0.0025 BTC fee with each transaction (when I last checked), and Blockchain.info's wallet has a custom fee you can change, but the fees of previous transactions may build-up to hit you in a later date.

Literally this thread:

"Nobody is FORCING you to get to the city by using your car, you can totally just take a bike and NOT pay for gas but it will take you a bit longer to get there."

Thats technically true, but its not practical in the slightest, which is pretty much the OP's argument.

I always thought that it the BTC, it will be a fees free world. :p
Oh okay, just little fees compared to others. :D

You can not pay but of course you would pay by the extremely long wait time to get confirmations, I agree the standard fee is high however.

It must have been a while since you checked.

Bitcoin-QT>Preferences>Wallet>'Pay transaction fee' allows being set to 0.00000000.

If I were a doctor, and some guy sent me bitcoin to have me operate on him and save his life, I wouldn't even need to wait for a confirmation or block to see in 10 seconds that the transaction will probably get included in the chain.

But since, if I were a doctor, I'd probably work on saving your ass anyway first and worry later about how you are going to pay. Maybe by the time the surgery is done, I'd already have 6 confirmations and it won't be an issue anymore.


Bitcoin is, in my opinion, the safest way I can accept a large payment where I am sure it won't be reversed, bounce, or declined.

I'm selling a car for 10 BTC. Once I see the transaction on the network, I wait 20 seconds, then I hand over the keys to you. Go away and drive. Have fun!

So, do you want free gas? Somebody has to pay for it.

Actually if you have old coins, you can send with no fee and the transaction broadcast fine. Not sure if Armory allow no fee transactions, but the point of this thread is every wallet should allow no fee transactions if it meets no fee rules...

And the point of the rest of us is that other people are not obligated to make things more practical for you at their expense.

When you get your way at the expense of other people, that's the opposite of freedom.  It's not much good to get "freedom" if it comes by taking it away from other people.

Just though I would post this here seeing as this thread is about the miner fees.

I reported an 'error' to Circle earlier as no miner fee was taken on my tx's. They informed me that Circle pays all the miner fees on behalf of their customers. Not sure for how long they will be doing this and or if this is a permanent arrangement or just a promotion.

That's how Coinbase has also worked as long as I've used them.

I'm not so sure why anyone would be so against the fee when it is as small as it is.   You seriously don't even notice it.  IMO  it helps the system keep moving, if everyone decides to remove the transaction fees completely, we would probably be taking a big step back...

I am interested in this new floating fee mechanism. I managed to find a few articles on it but none had any details on the new rules. This one mentioned a new setting "txconfirmtarget":
http://www.bitcoinx.com/bitcoin-core-update-to-include-floating-fees

Where can I find more details on this new fee system?

The zero fees are usefull when joining dust with your aged coin. You doing this way favor to the blockchain because you reduce network unspent inputs and thus lowering memory and CPU cycles requirements for Bitcoin core. But using zero fee tx for creating more outputs from fever inputs should be not allowed...

How do you pretend the system to work without fees? The miners will need fees or the system will collapse.

Definitivelly the fees will be needed after few next block reward halvings. Today not much important when block reward is 25 BTC and fees about 0.2 BTC  :)

This has never been the case that EACH transaction sent from QT required a fee. You have always been able to send zero fee transactions with QT or Core without a fee.  And depending on size and age they'll likely confirm quickly. (And you can even send spammy transactions, but most miners won't include them in a block.)

If you are paying a .0025 BTC fee with QT with a TX with one input and two outputs then you probably have a setting messed up. QT allows you to set the default fee and it can be set to zero if you wish

Bitcoin Core soft-fork "No Forced TX Fee" v0.9.2.1 avaiable
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=22434.0

It should get an update soon.

Well, low fees will be great together with fast/instant transactions. Than no fees and a chance of a failed transaction.

You have two choices:

1. Can it wait? If you can wait a day or two, send with no TX fee.
2. Is it important to be confirmed soon? Spend with the 0.0001 TX fee.

If I'm just sending to a friend, or someone who trusts me and they don't really need it immediately, we can agree on not adding the TX fee. I did that once, it took less than a day, but more than a few hours.

It's not worth it for most transactions, no matter what, to avoid the fee, so I now include the minimum fee almost all the time. It gets a confirmation in the next block or 2.

i pay the fee but indeed i usualy sendm ore than 0,5BTCor microtransaction.. dont kill me.. LTC is better :P

Unless you are only sending ~$1.25 or less worth of bitcoin the TX fee is more efficient then using a credit card.

Once you are sending ~$10.00 worth of bitcoin the TX fee is really not much more then a rounding error

Why ridiculous?! Paying fees allows a more fast transaction.

I believe that now it is time to scrap the tx fee. The miners are hardly getting any benefits out of the transaction fee and the opponents of Bitcoin are using it as a weapon to attack the Bitcoin community.

I am sure the spammers would love that.

They would.  And it won't happen anyway!  ;-)

And, has been stated, you can always use no fees depending on the age of coins etc.  Opponents of bitcoin only use it to attack bitcoin in front of people who don't know any better, so education regarding free transactions is key.

Sidechains are also going to be very important.

??? Transaction fees are what are going to support the miners and give the miners to continue to mine over the long term. The block subsidies are meant to be temporary and over time will be less and the percentage of total rewards should decrease

I don't know there is a wallet without fee,thanks for reminding me about that!

I think the wallet clients want to take some

Everyone wants a cut

Over the next hundred years? Sure, that's temporarily long, it's almost permanent. I can't look past two or three block halving eras into the future, but we shouldn't be worrying about transaction fees as payments to miners for the next 4 to 8 years yet.

If they charge no fees, how can they run the platform

Then they shouldn't claim to be free

tx fees helps you to process your transaction fast
als in future when bitcoin block rewards will dropped then Tx fees will be a way to get bitcoin other then mining

uhhh.. tx fees goes to miners.

Miners should either get coins they mine or fees, but not both

Currently, miners get both. How do you propose to separate them? The miner gets the block reward, because he found the block. Because he finds the block, he gets all the tx fees that are included in that block.

Miner's income is supposed to transition from 100% block rewards to 100% fees at some point in the future. If you mined back in 2009-2011 you will remember that fees were 0% back then. When we drop to 12.5 BTC block rewards in a couple of years expect fees to go up. It is working as designed.

Fork the code with your suggestion and let us know how it works out.  See how many miners mine your fork.

The great thing about bitcoin is, no one can force you to do anything. There are lots of options out there and lots of methods to store and pay.

Except for signing and logging your transactions on the blockchain of course

Where did you see any such claim?

Who's forcing someone to use the blockchain?

I use .00001 fee all the time and it's gets added pretty quickly.  $.003 isn't very ridiculous to me when i'm moving $1500 or even $5 around.. total fees per block currently avgs .1 - .2 btc.. big whoop.

Exactly. It is working fine. I wish people would stop trying to fix the parts of bitcoin that are working. If you cut off the fees to miners then why on Earth would they spend money on equipment and electricity to do work for you?

Well no one, but to view transactions you must use some kind of public ledger which is where the blockchain jumps in.

no you are not forced to pay tx fee
you can send money without tx fees
just sending fund with tx fees will speedup your transaction confirmation
and tx without fees can take a lot of time to get confirmed

It is not a taxe that you don't have a choice of paying, it is a price for a service that you can choose not to use

Right. and let's break this down:
We are FORCED to pay a tax upon every transaction    -Nope
and they say Bitcoin doesn't have any taxes                -Nope, who said that?
Taxation is unconstitutional theft via armed extortion.  - lol Nope
it's unavoidable, and is without the armed extortion (YOU ARE FORCED TO PAY). -Nope

Agreed. You can choose your transaction fees really. It's just your transaction will confirm slower.

Well the "tax" that you are "forced" to pay (ex, the TX fees) is something that helps keep your money secure by giving the miners an incentive to continue to mine (and receive TX fees).

The overall "tax" that is paid on a per TX basis is very small and is often free if the circumstances warrant.

As of now, transaction fee is not proving to be an effective anti-spamming measure. Spamming is wide spread. Some other measure needs to be introduced, inorder to combat spamming.

Transactions fees are voluntary and can be ignored if you choose.
Miners including you transaction in their block is voluntary and can ignore it if they choose.

Not if you use Armory

Blockchain's online wallet also forces such a fee.

I was refering to the bitcoin network.

You can send without any fees on blockchain if you send manually instead of using the "quick send" tab

Even if transaction fees were required, using Bitcoin isn't mandated by any law.  You're free not to use it if you don't like the fees.

Even with quick send the fee can be set beforehand.

The fee provided is good, otherwise transactions may remain stuck for hours or even days.

Yes, to a layman who has always heard of transaction fees in USD/percentage terms, Bitcoin's transaction fee structure can be quite abstruse.
Education  is the key.

You can also create a custom TX, using a number of available tools to create a TX that does not include a TX fee and push it to the network

you can always send it withh 0.0000000 tx fee and ust wait on it.. you are paying for the convienence and speed of blockchain and for the miners cost to send your tx its not really so bad...

u only need to pay tax if u want your transaction to be confirmed
 :P

I heard that the minimum relay fee in Bitcoin Core was reduced to 0.000 01 BTC/kB = 1000 satoshi/kB quite some time ago.  One can see:
under "Help, Command-line options" in bitcoin-qt.

I believe that the current minimum relay fee for Armory is still 10 000 satoshi/kB, as suggested by:
(currently lines 128-129 of armoryengine/ArmoryUtils.py (https://github.com/etotheipi/BitcoinArmory/blob/master/armoryengine/ArmoryUtils.py#L128-L129))

This is not true. Many/most TX will get confirmed by the miners within a few hours (provided the TX is not unreasonably large in terms of kb) and many TX are confirmed in the next block if they are without a TX fee.

If you want to attempt a free transaction then the imperative is on you to get a client which supports the functionality. Most of those wallets acknowledge that a majority of users aren't too worried about parting with 3c per transaction (or less depending on exchange rate and future implementations). You need to realise that without fees there will be no incentive for miners once block rewards finish and hence the network will die.

Most clients do support the ability to push a "free" TX to the network, although you will need to change some setting in order to use "free" TXs.

The wallet services will generally, by default include a TX fee because the TX fee will increase the changes that a TX will get confirmed by the network quickly

I changed my electrum from .0002 to .0001. I could probably lower it but I like the priority for my tx.

I also find this a problem.
Bitcoin-qt also makes you pay a tx fee (apart from armory as others said), which is not optional in many cases. Sure I can wait for my coins to "age" and then I might not have to pay. This however, means that I cannot use my money when I want to.

Paying some small tx is probably not a problem for early players who racked up tons of coins when it was worth 1 cent, but for those who are new (and the "most of the users will never own 1 BTC") it can be annoying, especially if they are only getting started with Bitcoin.

A question about transaction fees: after 2040 - when Bitcoin mining will end - are we going to pay the same fee?

A fee of 0.0001 BTC costs less than $0.04, regardless of how much you paid for your BTC. Are you really complaining that a fee of $0.04 is too high?

I realize that there are a lot of people in the world that live in $2 a day, but unless you are one of them, complaining about a 0.0001 BTC fee is ridiculous.

Mining will never stop, but the subsidy (currently at 25 BTC) will go to 0 around the year 2140. As long as the subsidy is high enough, the transaction fee is primarily used to prevent DOS attacks. Eventually, the fees will replace the subsidy and the minimum fee will become market-driven so it could go up or down.

The average TX fee of .0001 (or $0.04) is going to be less then the effective fee that you will need to pay to use a credit card (via credit card processing fees) and is generally going to be less then the cost for a merchant to keep cash safe, especially for larger transactions.

Some guy sent about 1,000 BTC and he included a 0.005 tx fee.

This is that transaction:
https://blockchain.info/tx/72bec59c7649d4527d8d7848ebc36840c89f5d36d18db9a91afd34d800826722

This is what it means:
Output $ 376,352.59
Fees $ 1.79

That kind of transaction fee for that kind of money sent is indeed ridiculous! He just sent over $376,352 over the internet to what may eventually end up being over a thousand different people, without opening an account anywhere or asking anybody’s permission. That transaction was completed and confirmed in about six minutes, and it cost about fifty cents in transaction fees at that time.

Ridiculous!

I think bitcoin is a pretty fair system. If you transferred that amount by bank you would probably end up paying a ton of transaction fees.
That guy could have included a zero transaction fee, and the transaction is probably still gunna confirm within 10 blocks.

The transaction fee is very small (less 10 cents) and yet you still yelling? Man!

I find it very interesting that all of the addresses this person sent BTC to started with '1Ag'; I somewhat suspect that this person has hashed several addresses and sent this bitcoin to himself.

I would agree that, if you did have this many 'accounts' with various banks then it would cost more then the ~$2.00 from buying checks in order to write this many checks to yourself

You suspect well.  This was one of Casascius' coin-loading transactions.  This particular transaction corresponds to a stock of silver rounds (note that the chemical symbol for silver is Ag).

Ahhh, at first I thought it was some kind of pool like payout (or some other similar payout), then I started to notice that all of the addresses were somewhat similar. (LOL).

IMO it would have been realistic for them not to have included a TX fee at all as they should not have been in any kind of rush to get the TX confirmed (they likely had days before the BTC "had" to be confirmed), and could have split up the transactions into smaller TXs as necessary

Here is a more recent transaction:

https://blockchain.info/tx/32110c84009bcc3cd77ba4535f7e86813a54747fe9c1e9176dc83961e9ea8a5e

In bitcoin:
Total Output: 1,906.98281757 BTC
Fees: 0.0005 BTC

In USD:
Total Output: $ 702,990.15
Fees: $ 0.18

Confirmed and included in a block in 4 minutes.

They overpaid for their TX fee (although the TX did have a "lot" of inputs) by a factor of ~5. It is less clear in this case, however many use cases of bitcoin do not require a 10 minute (or a 4 minute) confirmation, as many uses only need a TX to be "eventually" confirmed after a much longer time (hours or a day)

I once had a small transaction. Took about less than 48 hours to confirm. Still, it bothered both me and the receiver. We just waited it out. I no longer make "free" transactions, I just include a small fee almost all the time now.

It would not bother me as long as you know the counterparty is not going to be receiving the goods/services they are to receive for several days. If for example you sent a TX to bitpay to pay for an order on amazon (both of whom I would trust to "send first") without a TX fee, most of the time they will not be able to send the goods for a couple of days so the fact that it takes 48 hours to confirm would mean nothing because if one of the inputs is double spent then amazon could simply cancel the order

If you look at the fees percentage wise, it is pretty cheap. It's large enough to reduce dust transactions without making micro transactions too expensive.

I have no issues with fees if they help the protocol or the services. Sometimes the fees are too much though. I have like .0001 BTC at certain places but can move them because that's just how much the fee costs.

I probably have a few pennies and nickels scattered around the house but i don't feel the need to gather them all up.

What ridiculous transaction fee , it's just for helping the protocol  , and it's a very low amount comparing to other payment methods if not zero.

The goal/theory is that transactions fees will make up a larger percentage of the total block reward over time, so as the block subsidy decreases, the miners will still have sufficient incentive to continue to mine.

So we will either have a higher and higher bitcoin price or a higher and higher transaction fee in unit of btc, as block reward halves, right?

Or unprofitable miners shut off their mining equipment, and we have lower mining difficulty (resulting in higher revenue for those that continue mining).

The same plugs that
are forced to get fat because Mcdonalds food is unhealthy
and forced to eat it because their marketing is too convincing
and the ones who have 6 kids, that the government doesn't do enough to support
and the same ones who protest their shitty paying jobs because they are forced to work there
Ugh, they are everywhere.

You forgot to point out that the network difficulty is much higher then it needs to be right now in order for the network to be sufficiently secure so miners shutting off their equipment in semi-mass would not be a huge problem for network security

EDIT: another scenario is that we see a higher overall level of bitcon transactions so more people pay the same fee, resulting in overall higher revenue for the miners (this is what satoshi envisioned)

One of my first transactions was some dust from one wallet to the other and the fees did seem expensive at the time but since then i've learnt that dust transactions have so many outputs which adds to the fee.
Now when you start hearing stories like 700k being sent for a $0.18 things look a little better.
You could probably send $10 or less to 1000 people for a total of about $1 in fees, try doing that with a bank or wire transfer company.
No one is forced to pay any fees actually.

I absolutely HATE paying 0.001 BTC

Pay taxes? What am I? Poor?

This is NOT what Lincoln was shot for

You are actually off by a factor of 10 as to how much you will generally need to pay for a TX fee. The "standard" TX fee stands at .0001 BTC not .001 BTC.

Either way the "fee" is very small when compared to the alternatives.

It's 0.001 on Armory

Change it in "settings".

actually you can avoid the payment of the fee,but you take the risk that your bitcoins may not arrive,so it is our choice

No such option in my version of Armory

Use a different client then. QT allows you to change the default TX fee. Blockchain.info will allow you to set a custom TX fee. Multibit will manage your inputs and will use a TX fee that is the minimum generally required to get your TX quickly confirmed by the network. You can manually create a TX that does not include a TX fee

EDIT: no one is "forcing" you to use armory

QT does allow you to change the TX fee, which doesn't really matter since sometimes it will force you to pay it. Hence it is not optional any more. (Too many small transactions. I get why this is, however it is still funny that I get "punished" for paying 100€ in 5€ bills)

I do see that the fee is incredibly low and personally I think one of the best uses of Bitcoins is to send money half way across the world as fiat => BTC => fiat and if you are moving large sums, it is indeed negligible.

As I said, it "hurts" people who are getting into bitcoin and only have some 0.01 BTC or so. In that case you might not want hold on to every penny. Of course if you have 700'000$ to paly with, 2$ don't matter.

Also, since mining is not truly decentralized any more, don't tx fees support cloudmining services/farms then?

You are NOT forced to pay, and if no one paid, Bitcoin would be dead because miners need incentive. Do you want that?

Right now miners have a big enough incentive with the mining reward, fees are here for long term considerations and to organize the network

If I set 0 tx fee in /settings and try to send a transaction it will tell me that the amount I want to send is X + Y of transaction fees. "Do you want to Send? Yes/Cancel" So yes it is optional in a way that if I change my mind about sending the coins and then I don't pay the tx fee. This is in qt core. Previous versions simply asked "This transaction is over the size limit, do you want to include XY amount of transaction fees to be processed faster?" and there you could say no I'm fine with a slower transaction. I don't think newer clients do it like this.



100% agree.

You don't have to pay the transaction fee, but be prepared to wait a long time for your transactions to confirm.

It's not worth it to send transactions without fee as it may take days before it confirms.

At this point 0.0001BTC is only 4 cent. Don't waste days just to save yourself a few cent.

It's terrible, I had to shell out half a cent or so to have a few hundred dollars' value transfered half way round the world in less than a second.

It depends on your definition of a "long time". Even transactions that will eventually confirm without a fee will do so within ~18 hours or so. If you compare this to how long it takes for a check to 'clear' the banking system this is still very quick

Half a cent to have a secured non reversible transaction in a commodity that cannot be inflated to death and is likely to raise in value. Also, you avoid a third party risk if you store it yourself.

You are not forced to do anything, or you don't understand how it works. Fees are so that transactions are completed faster and once all the coins are mined there is some incentive for people to keep mining.

In as much as the purpose of money is to provide a system whereby resources are allocated "efficiently" to areas of most need, i.e. those who value them highest and will pay most for them, the limited resource of space in a block is allocated first to those most willing to pay for it.

If you were expecting bitcoin to be anti-capitalist, well, sorry about your luck.

Bitcoin is a free market decentralized currency that allows to have a non government manipulated mean of exchange that has intrinsic value

If you don't pay a tx fee, the transaction may take several days to confirm. Sometimes they confirm within a few hours. I've had one take a day or two, I forgot. Even if it takes 3 days, this is still much faster than waiting for a bank or demand draft from another country to clear.

Currently, a minimum tx fee of 0.00001 BTC will ensure that your transaction will confirm within the next couple of hours, probably sooner, usually within the next block.

can we remove it it?

You are not forced to pay a TX fee (probably said at least 10x so far in this thread) although removing the TX fee from your TX will generally cause small delays in the confirmation of your transaction.

Even without a TX fee your transaction will likely still be confirmed in much less time then most other remittance services can offer.

IMO the OP has lost all credibility by making this thread.

The delays are not always small - there are various factors (including the settings of the major mining pools) that have implications upon whether you're transaction will actually ever go through. Generally though larger transactions (>1000 bytes) may not pass without a fee.

They're not always small if you pay. This one time, at band camp, I sent a tx with full fee, and the network hit a "bad luck" patch, half hour between blocks, and txs got backed up, took 12 hours to confirm. Then another time, sent a small one without fee, and network was in a "good luck" patch with 6 blocks in 25 mins, so got 6 confirms in 25 min.

What about those moments when people accidentally omit a few zeros and end up sending transactions with 0.1 BTC worth of fees?

As a miner... there's no problem with that :D

In that case I'm afraid it's bad news.  :-\
Or if you are the miner who included your block, It's good news.  :)

This is when the importance of attention to detail is made more clear. Additionally most clients will automatically setup the TX for you including the suggested fee to include in order to have the transaction confirm quickly.

Additionally, I can say that I have, on a few occasions included a .001 TX fee instead of a .0001 TX fee, however I think that a $0.40 fee is still very cost efficient and I have sent enough no TX fee TXs so that my average fee is under .0001 even with these mistakes

Out of curiosity.
Even when setting the tx fee to 0 in settings (bitcoin core client), when sending a payment I get a similar popup.
http://pcgeeks.bugs3.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Transaction_fee.png
Yes - Send transaction and pay fee
Cancel - Cancel transaction

How is it then "optional" to pay the fee? There doesn't seem to be a way around it.

Transaction fee is not high. If you make small BTC transfer, then fee is too high. You can try to pay smaller fee, but the question then will be - when transfer will arrive. With standart fee 0.0001 BTC, transfer go instantly.

If you send a transaction without a customary fee, then it is very likely that your transaction will take an exceptionally long time to confirm.

The Bitcoin Core wallet is designed to protect unknowledgeable users from this problem.  If you really want to send a transaction without a customary fee with the Bitcoin Core wallet, then you can, but you'll need to use raw transactions.

If you don't want to take the risks associated with using raw transactions, and you want to take the risks associated with sending transactions without their customary fee, then you can use a wallet that doesn't enforce the fee requirements.  It's "optional" because you can "opt" to use a wallet that doesn't force you to include the fee.

Understood! Thanks for the explanation!

Mr Borisz,

There is this fork of the bitcoin core client:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=22434.0


It gets updated a few days or a few weeks after a new version of bitcoin core comes out.

It does not completely eliminate tx fees. For that, you can still do the raw transaction thingie.

Actually one of the advantages of Bitcoin was supposed to be the ease of doing Micro-transactions. The transaction fee will make that advantage exist no more. Something needs to be done on this front.

Bitcoin was never meant for micro transactions.

When have you ever seen a cheque for 4 cents or $0.04? (USD value). When do you ever swipe your credit card for 4 cents? If you go to the actually minimum tx fee of 0.00001 BTC, then today that is less than half a cent, or $0.004.

Just go ahead and send your transactions with zero fees. Noone is forcing you to include the fee and lots of transactions go through without paying. Also there is no punishment for not including a fee. Sure, you may have to wait longer for confirmations or even resend transactions that never confirm, but you won't go to jail for it.

Armory is. Said about 1000 times in this thread

So use a different client, or bug the Armory developers to change it.
You are a complaining about a problem with the software you have chosen to use, not with Bitcoin.

That is why I said the transaction fee is ridiculous, not "Bitcoin is ridiculous"

Armory is not the only one. Almost every single Bitcoin client is now forcing us to pay the tx fee. I think Blockchain.info is the only exception. But even in Blockchain.info, I had one transaction turned down with BTC0.00005 tx fee.

Did you try the Command-Line options -mintxfee=<amt> and -minrelaytxfee=<amt>?

My preferred behaviour for a wallet, would be that it asks me every single time what fee I want to pay. Thus if I'm just doing a "wallet maintenance" shuffle and don't care how long it takes, no tx fee, then if I want "same day" service pay regular fee, if I think my TX is super important and want preferential treatment I should find it easy to add fees as I see fit.


One thing that would be good though, is if wallet could report the average fees and number of TX for the last block. Then if you saw fees were high and TX were high, you'd know that network was "busy" and you'd have the option of matching high fees to get priority or being content with waiting it out.


I believe that tx fees should maybe be "marketed"/explained to the user in terms of a familiar thing like postal service, with notional standards of service like "surface letter", "airmail letter", "international express" and "same day" and proportionate TX pricing. Well I'm not saying a no-fee TX should take a "far corner of the world" 3 months like surface letter, just that the scaling of time/cost should be similar.

I expect you'll be interested to read:

Read more here (https://bitcoinfoundation.org/2014/07/floating-fees-for-0-10/).

Having a fee is a great way to avoid having to many unnecessary transactions but the miners don't need the fees to profit right now, the block reward is enough so even lower fees in average could be possible.

It's true that miners don't need the fees to profit, but then they also don't need the transactions to profit.  Indeed, it seems that the block reward presently works against "even lower fees" because a transaction included in a block increases the probability that the block will be orphaned.

Just a couple days ago I did this:


I could have sent it without paying a fee though. Might have took an hour to be included in a block. However, I was impatient, and 4 cents to send 3500 USD seemed ridiculously cheap to me.

Oddly enough, I also did this one:


And I didn't even pay the fee, it was faster. So to me, that's also ridiculous.


Man, this is annoying, when I pay small, it takes longer than paying the "standard" and when I don't pay, it gets confirmed the fastest.

well said its a luxery fee of getting ur transfer made in timely manner

Could you explain why a transaction included in a block increases the probability that the block will be orphaned?

miners need extra rewards

Miners already receive reward for their work. It is called "mined blocks". They don't need to leach off the Bitcoin users to survive. Else, what will be the difference between fiat and BTC?

Sure.

Currently, when a new block is found, the entire block is sent to adjacent nodes which then, in turn, pass the block to their neighbours.  Meanwhile, other miners continue to build on the previous block, likely unaware that a new block has been found.  This delay between finding a block and getting a copy to every miner is what gives rise to orphans.

Including a transaction in a block increases the size of the block.  A block full of transactions can be a thousand times larger than an empty block.  Larger blocks take longer to propagate throughout the network and so allow more time for rival blocks to inadvertently appear.

You might be interested in some rough calculations (https://gist.github.com/gavinandresen/5044482) concerning this effect Gavin did a little while ago.

You might also be interested in this proposal (https://gist.github.com/gavinandresen/e20c3b5a1d4b97f79ac2) to improve the efficiency of relaying blocks.

I think we oughta scrap the current system and have an experience bar on blockchain.info, that keeps track of your mining level. Once it hits 99, you can order a cape for 0.01 BTC.


That would be the greatest incentive.

You don't understand how it works. In every case, your transaction was in the next block, and the time it took had nothing to do with your fee.

Then when you hit 150 XP, have "Staff of -v n00bs" that costs say 3 mana to use and lasts 24 hours.

Sometimes it skips a block or 2 (from experience with my TXs)

Also highly dependent who mines it, individual pool or soloers can elect not to include free tx I think, or allocate minimal space in the block for free ones.

"(The) delay between finding a block and getting a copy to every miner is what gives rise to orphans. (...) Larger blocks take longer to propagate throughout the network and so allow more time for rival blocks to inadvertently appear."

Ok thanks for the explication!

I do understand exactly how it works. I was trying to be funny. Sorry. :)

I was attempting to show how ridiculous the fee transaction fee is. You can currently pay 0.00001 as your tx fee. In the three cases above, I paid zero, 0.00001 and 0.0001.

The only reason Western Union is faster, is because, they use an internal messaging system, so you can think of it as off-chain, if that makes sense.

This is not true. The time it took (measured in blocks) has to do with the inventory of unconfirmed transactions in the nodes' memory pool. If the pool of unconfirmed transactions is large then a lower fee TX will take longer to confirm. If the memory pool size is small then it will likely not matter what size TX fee is included (up to a point)

In comparison to the block reward, the transaction fees pale at this point of time.
Going forward, as the block reward reduces, transaction fees will increase in importance.

Sending money via Western Union is actually not faster. It will generally take ~10 minutes from the time you hand the western union agent cash and the properly filled out form for the money to be available for the receiver (eg. "sign and transmit" the transaction). This does not even count the time it takes to drive to walmart (or other wu location), wait in line and fill out the paperwork

The sender and the receiver have to lose time to wait in line and fill the sheet. Also you can only send money during the opening hours and opening days of the WU location.
The fees are huge and you have to add a 3% fee on currency exchange.

Plus you have to come out of the basement and talk to people, that's always a huge disadvantage of real world shit. ;)

Lol i don't understand that fee is small for me i could pay this ammount. This is better than fiat.

Ok. Everyone is talking about it.

It's the $82,432,657.90 transaction that cost $0.04 to send.

You can avoid the fees if you use electrum where you can set it to zero. But you must fulfilled certain conditions like age and size of the transaction. If you are sending large tx who cares of the fees which adds up few cents. So it all depends on how you look at it.

Fees aren't really that high. I do understand why some would feel it is ridiculous. It is when newbie has a lot of dust from faucets and it costs more to send them. That is how bitcoin works, and it is not likely to change any time soon.

Well I guess this certainly proves that the OP does not know what he was talking about.

I don't think there is any other payment method that allows for such a large transaction to take place at the same (or lower) cost

I think there is one...and one only.  Cash. And that would be a shit ton of it, not to mention transporting it to the destination.. security... nevermind.

Electrum forces you to specify a transaction fee if the priority of the coins is not high enough. I guess there are other clients where you can try your luck with zero transaction fee, and hope for it to get confirmed.

The very simply solution would be to not use electrum. You can generally easily create, sign an push your own custom TX (as long as you have access to the private keys in question) and you can do all of the above while not including a TX fee with your custom transaction

It's called miner fee / transaction fee.
The fee is very low compared to credit card / paypal

The fee is only 0.0001 BTC
And the fee is only to appreciate the miner who help to secure P2P bitcoin network

Whatever you call it, it is compulsory only in certain transactions.

You don't even need to pay it usually. And either way it's a cent.

Transaction fees aren't the reason why people shy away from using bitcoin.
Even if they don't like transaction fees, all they have to do is compare it with other means of transferring value.

Exactly. A credit card or paypal transaction will almost always have a fixed charge/fee that is much greater then the equivalent of .0001.....the only real difference is that this is "paid" by the receiver instead of the sender so it is somewhat less transparent

It's a small amount to help maintain the chain.
If you realy want you don't have to pay, use another client.

Also it's somewhat hidden in pricing, sometimes you'll see 3% cash discount.

It is actually pretty rare that I see any kind of cash discount. I think that cash customers end up covering a portion of credit card fees. Plus it has only been recently that merchants were suppose to be allowed to offer different prices for paying in ways other then credit cards (although it did occasionally happen).

What I have seen is a number of companies offer some kind of discount for paying in bitcoin......just saying op ;) (making the effective TX fee negative)

Where I stay, the terms & conditions of credit card companies explicitly tell the merchant that they are not supposed to add any transaction fees for credit card transactions. I am not sure if merchants would be allowed to offer cash discounts (essentially making credit cards costlier) if they agree to those terms and conditions.

The thing with credit cards, the merchant is not allowed to add a surcharge if customers pay with credit cards, but the merchant may apply a discount if the customer pays in cash. It's a loophole, and while on the surface it means the same thing, under the law, it is different. That is why cash is king.

In almost any store I go to, when I find an item I want to buy, and they advertise zero percent on credit cards, I always ask the salesperson if I can get a discount if I pay in cash, in full. Almost always, a discount is applicable. If not, I escalate it to someone in authority who can apply the discount.

So I think you didn't   see this  thread : FOR LAUGH , this guy sent 0.0001 with 2 btc FEE !! (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=887207.0)   - Check and come back .

This is when you curse the irreversible nature of Bitcoin transactions.  ;D

I have a curiosity about tx 0
How long usually takes confirmations?

Have you ever seen credit card fee ?
It's fee very huge compared to bitcoin transaction fee

And nobody force you to input any fee to transaction
You can use 0 BTC

Haha yeah you're right , in this case bitcoin is not very good ;D but in other cases it is a really great currency.

If you are referring to how long it usually takes to get a 0 tx fee transaction confirmed then it really depends on how long it has been since the inputs have last been spent. If enough bitcoin days are being destroyed (if you are spending enough bitcoin that has been long enough since the inputs were last transferred) then it should confirm within one or two blocks. If there are a large number of unconfirmed transactions and/or there happens to be a longer then normal time between blocks when you push your transaction then it make take somewhat longer

The word cheapskate comes to mind when people don't add transaction fees.

You aren't forced but you would have to wait allot if you don't pay it, I do agree the fee is extremely high for a currency that was promoted by the fact it allows micro-payments.

3.5cents of Dollar to send thousands or tens of thousands of Dollars is extremely high? Relative to what other option??


He wanted to send 2BTC with a 0.0001 fee. :(

Don't forget when all the 21 million coins have been mined we need to rely on the transaction fee to keep the network going. So don't be so stingy when it comes to paying fee. Just accept the reality. After all... Just few cents is considered small amount for a normal standard transaction taking place currently