Do miners broadcast their transaction fees?

[Strongman]

Can we possibly have a visual marketplace of what transaction fees are available with their respective computing power?

[kjj]

People are working on various parts of this, but there isn't much urgency yet because virtually all miners just follow the default rules.  And the default rules are more of a spam prevention thing than real fees.  But the snowball is rolling.

[theymos]

No, and they probably never will. Miners would be greatly incentivized to tell people that they charge higher fees than they actually do.

[kjj]

No, and they probably never will. Miners would be greatly incentivized to tell people that they charge higher fees than they actually do.

A quick look at recent blocks will reveal the lie.  In that sense, the fees are already being broadcast.

Gavin said that he is planning to change the default behavior from "high priority first" to "high fee first".  Once that is done, it will become the new default for most miners fairly quickly.

[DeathAndTaxes]

A far more useful system is for the client to be "smart".  The client could look at the past say 72 hours of blocks evaluate the distribution of fees on tx in those blocks and then compare it to the memory pool (tx waiting for a block) and provide the user with some guesstimates.   "i.e. for 90% chance of inclusion in the next block a fee of 0.005 BTC is recommended."

IIRC Gavin indicated that the end goal is for the client to give the user some information on fees HOWEVER remember that Bitcoin is in beta and a major patch which will give pool operators the ability to fine tune fee rules isn't part of the current version yet.   Until miners can make intelligent decisions about fees providing those kind of stats to users is just noise.

[Graet]

Before I left for vacation, I submitted a pull request that makes the default policy for miners "more fees == more likely to get into a block."  That will be in the 0.7 release (the policy before was mostly "higher priority == more likely to get into a block"), and I've been encouraging the big mining pool operators to implement something similar if they have their own transaction-selection code.

When I get back from vacation I plan on writing code to watch the transactions that do or do not make it into blocks to derive an estimate of the average miners' fee policy, and use that to recommend a reasonable fee to the user.

Those changes will let fees float naturally-- users and miners will form a market and fees will rise or fall based on what users are willing to pay and what miners are willing to accept. I don't like the arbitrary, centralized setting of fees that we've had up until now.

Bitcoin users have been requesting the ability to pay higher fee for higher priority in blocks, especially since satoshidice, Gavin has responded
With the block reward halving soon it only makes sense that pools paying out txn fees adopt these rules and reward their miners as best they can