Transaction Fee

[galz]

Why do sites prefer to deliever a group of transactions and pay a fee and not to transfer it one by one?

[CIYAM]

Put simply the fees are in accordance to the size of the tx so a single "sendmany" tx vs. 100s of smaller single output txs will save sites a *lot* of fees especially if the tx values are very small.

[gbl08ma]

(putting in simpler words what's been said above...)
Because if they performed transactions one by one, they would have to pay lots of fees, one for each transaction. (Not to mention they would spam the blockchain.) This way they pay a single fee for a transaction where they pay many people (addresses) at once.

[CIYAM]

Indeed - despite what some people have tried to push Bitcoin was never designed to be a "micropayment" system (and Gavin has already hinted that changes may be coming to prevent *dust* tx's from even being accepted).

[ComposerPianist]

I love Bitcoin and what it's doing but there are indeed a few areas that need improving. You can't really do micropayments and the blocks are too slow. Still revolutionary at the time though. 

[galz]

Wait, I thought the fees are required only when delivering a large block.

[CIYAM]

Wait, I thought the fees are required only when delivering a large block.

If fees were not demanded for small amounts of new *coinage* then the network could easily be flooded with spam tx's that would prevent any others from being accepted (so a minimum fee has always been required to make such an attack too expensive to keep it up for days at a time).

[galz]

Wait, I thought the fees are required only when delivering a large block.

If fees were not demanded for small amounts of new *coinage* then the network could easily be flooded with spam tx's that would prevent any others from being accepted (so a minimum fee has always been required to make such an attack too expensive to keep it up for days at a time).

Ok, and who is getting this money?

[shiv]

miners, afaik

[CIYAM]

miners, afaik

Correct - along with the (currently) 25 BTC block reward the successful miner also gets the fees for all txs included in the block.

[galz]

miners, afaik

Correct - along with the (currently) 25 BTC block reward the successful miner also gets the fees for all txs included in the block.

For renting your resources (CPU, GPU, Electricity) to the network? If I had a powerful computer, I would have been a miner too.

By the way, here's why I thought fees are not always needed:

Transaction fees may be included with any transfer of bitcoins from one address to another. At the moment, many transactions are typically processed in a way where no fee is expected at all, but for transactions which draw coins from many bitcoin addresses and therefore have a large data size, a small transaction fee is usually expected.

(From en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction_fees)

[nakkemake]

Transaction fees are a good thing in the end.

[elizserussell]

yes i did also gets the fees.

[CIYAM]

By the way, here's why I thought fees are not always needed:

You are quite correct that fees are not always needed (I have rarely paid any) - provided that your UTXOs aren't too small and are old enough then no fee is required (although you may have to wait quite a while for the tx to be included in a block).