Thanks for the reply - and it's always good news to hear that I'm sane (even if it's probably not true :p)

I don't like it one bit. As I understand it, the higher the fee, the quicker (probabilistically) miners or other users will verify your transaction. If you force people to always pay a fee, then you're distorting the market: people who pay bugger all will get punished with long verification times, and eventually some equilibrium value of a fee will be reached that meets the needs of people who want fast verification and miners who want paying for services.

And those of us who don't care about the verification times for certain transactions will get screwed over, especially for a transaction of say 0.05 with a 0.01 fee!

Hi everyone,

Apologies if this is a dumb/old question - I've tried searching for it but searching for "fee" is rather a mug's game.

I just upgraded to the 0.3.21 client on my Mac, and did a simple transaction of 0.05 to myself. I've got my client set to a zero fee by default; as I understand it, this will cause a delay in the transaction verification due to nobody wanting to verify my blocks for free. That's fair enough - like when using a cheque, for me the time taking to verify is not overly important.

But I would swear blind the client just forced me to pay a fee. It came up with a little window saying "This transaction is over the size limit. You can still send it for a fee of 0.01, which goes to the nodes that process your transaction and helps to support the network. Do you want to pay the fee?"

I clicked no, and it didn't appear to go forward. I tried again, and clicked yes, and it went.

Have I misunderstood here? Is something screwy going on, or is this new policy? (Either way I don't like it, but let's see what's happened first!)

Thanks in advance,

Michael

PS If it is policy, I can understand the logic but really dislike it.

You've made me think of another question to ask: will all new instances of BitCoin clients always have to download all existing blocks? Won't that eventually mean that as the number of blocks increases, the time taken to download the blocks and the space to store it will be enormous.

I'm presuming I've got this wrong, as the developpers are rather cleverer than me, but can someone explain the flaw in my thinking?

Thanks for the replies, all three of you, that makes a bit more sense to me now. I'll read up on it more, now I have some more intuition for it.

I think I was just worrying too much, which considering that at the time I'd spent no real money is pretty ridiculous of me :p.

I think I have an answer for my first question. Looking at the nice new wiki intro, it said that no generation could take place until all the blocks were downloaded. Well, how could the block with my transaction be downloaded, if perhaps the client was still downloading previous blocks? I've just bought some BitCoins and that transaction appeared within minutes at most  

Hi everyone! Newbie questions follow, so my apologies in advance. (I've looked at existing posts but still not quite clear).

Firstly, I went to the https://freebitcoins.appspot.com/ site to claim my five free generous BCs, but I've not yet received them. This was nearly 24 hours ago; I had to turn off my computer soon after doing it, but if I understand BitCoin right (big if!) that shouldn't matter. Scrap that, I just received it a smidgin short of 24 hours after the event. Why did it take so long?

Secondly, I can't get this port 8333 forwarding thing sorted: my wireless router and I aren't on speaking terms, the bloody thing. Does that matter? The BitCoin client shows a few (6-8) connections anyway.

Thirdly, I've not generated any coins yet. I think this one is ok; it's a random process, and it does it in blocks (right term? :s) of 50 coins, so can take many days of CPU time before I generate them: a combination of being a random process, and being a random process with a large period because 50 coins is rather a lot.

Fourthly: no question here, just a big thumbs up. Interesting idea, this BitCoin, not that I understand it yet. Even if it perhaps just acts as an experiment for a later currency, I'm intrigued. Big well done, guys.