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.

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.