Bitcoin Forum

So I have seen a few people sending bitcoins without any miner fees, and their amount eventually got sent back after a week or so.

So, what do you think the technique(or tips) for sending bitcoins without miner fees would be? This would be really helpful for sending small amounts less than BTC0.001 since the transaction fee would be more than 10% of the real amount transferred.

Thats bc.i specific behaviour, coins dont "get send" back usually.


Inputs of 1 Bitcoin with 144 confirmations (~1 day) typically have a high enough priority to be used in a transaction with a single output to be confirmed in a reasonable amount of time. Thus if you want to spend 0.001, just wait 1000 days, pay the fee or use an off chain system like changetip.

The minimum fee required for send a tx in the new bitcoin core is 1'000 satoshi, I think with 1k  as fee your bitcoin will be confirmed in less than 30 minutes (try and report here your test with the transaction id).

Uhhh... Say I was sending 10 BTC, am I going to only wait 1/10 of a day?


I think the guys I was talking about used blockchain.info.

what if a wallet contains many small (~5k sat) payouts. how long will it take for them to have high enough priority?
last time i sent some of these coins to an exchange and it had low priority while i had 0.0001 fee included.
the coins were at least a week in my wallet before sending.

Probably 1000 days? I doubt you'll get more than 20 small payouts from faucets...

in total 8 faucet payouts and 3 normal (less than 0.01) received transactions.
it took over 10 blocks to get a single confirmation while the fee was 0.0001.

~14.4 blocks, yes its linear.


Every input has to mature on its own. The more inputs you use the bigger the transaction gets and the higher the priority has to be in order to get away without fee. Keep in mind that miners typically only reserve 50 kbyte in a block for TX without fee. A fee must also be high enough in comparison to the size in bytes. The typical rule of thumb is 10k satoshi per every 1000 bytes. Thus if your transaction is bigger than 1000 byte the fee would be 0.0002 after this rule. Its not perfect, but its a pretty good estimate.


Payouts from faucets are a different beast because they are typically very small. I recently helped[1] someone with >2000 inputs and total amount of ~0.5 BTC from faucets. It took some years to gather that much and I had to pay ~0.01 BTC in fees to move the coins. It also took several seperate transactions. This might sound odd, but the best way to spend funds from faucets is to combine them with bigger inputs.

E.g. if you have an input of 1 BTC that is confirmed for 1 day (or longer) and an input of 1 satoshi you can use both and send them to yourself. The next day you take the big input with another small input, etc. This will take some time, but it would allow you to fuse all inputs into a single big one over time without the need to pay a fee.

[1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=970041.msg10603746#msg10603746

Don't send small amounts with zero fee. They confirm because of luck. Send small amounts with 0.00001 fee is a much safer solution.

Its no luck, it's how much "old" is the input to be spent.
It's clearly said on the wiki, that the fee is a multiplier to the priority given to your transaction to make sure it gets a block sooner.

But as someone said, use a wallet that you can configure yourself the miner fee and pay something like 100 or 1k satoshis, that will help a lot to get the first confirmation sooner.

Yeah, best thing to do is not send such small amounts. I really don't see why people would want to send something as small as a cent.
And the on;y place I can see this being required are faucets.

The wiki also says sending small amounts below 0.01 cannot be a free transaction. Age is not a factor for small amounts. They confirm because of luck.

that explains it. didn't know about the 10k sat fee per 1kb transaction size.
next time i will add a higher fee for this kind of transactions.
cheers.

My experience of successful transactions without a fee were over one BTC. It's against the rules to make smallish transactions without a fee.

Actually I won't suggest you do that. Sending without a fee will probably cause the transaction to get stuck for days. If you are really serious about bitcoin, the least you could do is to support the network and add the fee to pay for the miners' work. Does 0.1mbtc which amounts to less than 5 cents going to make any difference?

I think that it would work but it would take a long time. My friend was telling me that people would get mad at him because on his site people would send to it with no transaction fee and then blame him for the coins not showing up on the site.

People say this, yet I never ever ever experienced it. When I don't pay miner's fee, 2 hours has been the max for me. I do have to say, I rarely do so now, but in the beginning only, the little bitcoin I had, I didn't want to spend more than neccesary :)

Though you can send coins without fees, it is not advisable as it will put the transaction in the low-priority bracket, usually taking a couple of days (or even weeks in some instances) to be completed. And also, removing the fees in a transaction is not that good as it will lessen the incentive the miners receive for processing and computing for the whole block.

What??  Just pay the miner's fee, ya cheap fucking bastard!

Usually, people who make threads like this, is because, well, it was accidental, forgot to pay it.

Happened to me once and took 3-4 hours; it was also accidental and was enraged with my own lack of attention.

You also have to make sure you leave your wallet opened until you get the first confirmation.

Bitcoin's too slow, so you have to pay to get prioritized.

If you want both speed and cheap Tx's use AltCoins; that's why they're there, for cheaper and busier people.

Bitcoin's a rich person's game now it seems, if you can't afford to move the money, that's just lunacy.

Like paying $2 on a money order to pay a $0.99 bill.

In Gold mining, you often need to pay 10% commission for the wash & assayer or invest more for the equipment.

This falls under Costs of Doing Business.

If you can't afford to move Bitcoin, use another coin where Tx's fees are a fraction of Bitcoin's.

There, I gave you the solution if you worry about the pennies of Tx fees you give someone to help put food on their table.

Don't wonder why you can't afford the Tx fees, karma's a bitch and she found you.


If you understand the economy, you're wasting your time in this forum trying to explain it.

That's why more fortunes have been lost than made on this forum, no one understand shit about shit and think they know it all.

i've send bitcoin without the fees, but it never come back, in the end it get through, but it takes much longer(2-3 hours in my case)

How much did you send? It must be a big amount!

I sent with 500 satoshi miners fee on a BTC0.1 transaction, but it took like 6 hours or something to confirm. Considering you sent with no fees at all, that's very good time.

I suggest you to read all this full explanation : http://bitcoinfees.com 

  This is the part important :

"Finally, the client checks the size of the transaction in bytes. The size depends on the numbers of inputs and outputs, and is roughly:

| 148 * number_of_inputs + 34 * number_of_outputs + 10

If this size is less than 10,000 bytes and step 3 found that the transaction's priority was high enough to qualify as free, then the transaction still qualifies as free, otherwise a fee is required. The fee is charged per 1000 bytes or part thereof. The amount charged per 1000 bytes defaults to 0.0001 XBT, but can be increased in the Settings>Options>Main tab of the client. If you set the "fee per kB" to less than 0.0001 XBT in that dialog then a value of 0.0001 XBT will be used. When it applies, this fee per kB replaces any fee from step 2, rather than adding to it."

I always send bitcoins with low fees btw 100 and 1000 satoshi. it recommended to always add a fee to avoid the long wait.

Um.  A long time.  If you want to consolidate them without paying fees, put 20 of them together with a 1+ bitcoin input that's aged for more than 200 days and have one or two outputs of more reasonable size.  It may take a long-ish while to get a confirmation, as that'll be a big (in size) transaction and no-fee transactions propagate very slowly because they're rate-limited.  Wait for that output (or those outputs) to age for a while, then rinse, repeat. 

I really don't know why you would even send without any fee. It is just a PITA.. Also, for TX's smaller than the amount you specified, why not use something like Changetip or another off-chain service, until you have at least 0.01?

IDK, it just seems like a lot of messing around to get a tx sent, when you can just pay a couple cents to send quickly or use an off-chain service. Unless you forgot to add a fee..which happened to me when I first got into Bitcoin..I was waiting like 2 weeks for it to come back, and had lost all hope XD

This isn't true.  Transactions can happily be sent, relayed, and mined with no fee at all in Bitcoin core, if they have enough priority.

You must spend inputs with sufficient priority. That means to pick inputs that are large enough (BTC1 or higher), old enough (confirmed in the blockchain for 1 day or longer), and not too fragmented (ideally no more than a couple of inputs).

For example to send BTC0.001 you can pick a 1-day old input of BTC1 and send BTC0.999 change back to yourself.

How did you do it ? Please !

Inputs of 1 Bitcoin with 144 confirmations (~1 day) typically have a high enough priority to be used in a transaction with a single output to be confirmed in a reasonable amount of time without the need of a fee. If the input you want to use is smaller you have to wait longer for the priority to be high enough. E.g. 0.1 BTC take 10 days, 0.01 100 days, etc. Keep in mind that this is no guarantee as there is only 50KByte reserved for transactions without fee in each block.


tl;dr: have >1 BTC or wait a long time.

I don't understand Bitcoin core well enough to know the reason why my thinking is wrong on this, but it must be because I can't imagine no one has thought of it before.
Since I've had it demonstrated many times I'm not  the genius I like to think I am, I'll ask my stupid question anyway and hope to learn something.

With the current centralisation problem, is there any way to split fees from mining so that anyone can verify a transaction, thus incentiving people to become Bitcoin nodes in order to collect transaction fees.
OK, the mining community are not going to like this idea but...

The next question which puzzles me is why, if centralised mining is becoming such a big issue, or problem, can the Major miners simple agree to
split their mining operations into smaller pieces so that they no longer encroach on the 51% threat.

Another question, or suggestion, why not add a small fractional percentage to the fees to be collected and then donated, either to a charity, to be used
advertising Bitcoin in the media, or as a prize for those who've done most for the Bitcoin community, or maybe all of the above.

But, doesn't it put a wait on other remaining funds in your wallet that you can't send them before this transaction with lower fees get confirmed???

My question is, what are you worrying about sending such small amounts for?

I think more better to spend a little fee to convenience our transaction

This is a bit offtopic and should probably have its own thread, but Ill try to address the questions anyway.


Full nodes already verify a transaction they also decide whether or not to relay a transaction if it is valid, but does not meet certain criteria. One example would be the isDust() check. If a transaction creates an output that is smaller than 546 satoshi, it is considered Dust and will not be relayed. Miners might still put this transaction in a block, its just unlikely that the transaction will reach them.


In order to collect the fees one would currently have to find a block. Finding a block is intentional difficult to protect the network. There is also the issue how to determine which node should get a part of the reward. Its pretty easy to set up nodes that act like they have a full copy, but actually just relay block requests. Thus your suggestion would make it profitable to set up many nodes that are not actually helping anyone, but still get payment.


...without them, how could you fork bitcoin? If your new fork has no mining power, its very vulnerable.


IIRC that happend in the past when GHash.io was close to 51% they split up their operations.


You are free to donate something with every transaction you create to an organisation you deem worthy. I wouldnt think its wise to force an advertising budget. One of Satoshis concerns was that bitcoin might grow too fast, I think we still have some issues to resolve before bitcoin is fit for mainstream adoption.

not always in 3 blocks when you are unlucky and sometimes it takes more than an hour to create a new block so i wouldn't generalize to 30 min

btw, you can send for free at bitfinex  8)

There are people who gamble their coins, and so there are ones who send such small amounts too, so if they win 10% of 0.001 i.e.; 0.0001, it's the miner fee itself that they get and so, they try to send these transactions without the fee.

The amount can be small or big. If one of the output is a dust transaction, the time to confirm would be much slower. the larger the amount, the faster the confirmation time since the input affects the equation to calculate priority.

Hmmm this should be not possible but not recommanded , you may have double spent or your transaction could take alot of
time to be confirmed , but i see people now sending 10 BTC with 0,0001 fees and also didn't took a lot of time .

i think the amount doesn't matter much, because it was only 0.01 and it required 2 hour only to recieve first confirmation...also, the thing that matter more is how many transactions there are in that time  when you sent your amount

while queue positions can be problematic... because you don't know how many fee the others are using to speed up their transactions, so although you raise it, won't mean that will be faster....