Transaction Fees for Miners

[comfortablynumb]

How does the bitcoin network know which wallet to send transaction fees for miners to? I am having trouble understanding and can't find this info in any of the Wiki's.

[stiell]

You should have to input your public key when you setup your account on a pooling service. You'll have to pay them a small percentage as well. Not sure if there's a way to mine w/o a pooling service. I'm sure there is, I just don't know how.

[daytrader420]

You should have to input your public key when you setup your account on a pooling service. You'll have to pay them a small percentage as well. Not sure if there's a way to mine w/o a pooling service. I'm sure there is, I just don't know how.

You can setup your own pool. However with the difficulty at it's amazing height, it is super highly unlikely you will ever find a block (unless you have a few ASICs).
Pools offer a more consistent payout. In the long run, it works out the be about the same, except you pay the pool operator a fee.

[Murf]

To get any coins (you can get lucky but why take the chance) you must mine using a pool
check the pool sub-forum: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=41.0
Especially the pinned topic https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=104664.0
Where all is explained.

[jakez834]

Like everyone else has said, pooled mining really is the way to go at this point, unless you spend a bunch of money and get a distributed mining system set up in your closet, haha.

[JohnsonX]

or you could do solo if you can afford expensive specialized hardware

[El_Zilcho666]

I was under the impression they went to the account that mined the coins, pools usually keep them to keep the lights on.

[comfortablynumb]

Thanks guys, so if I mine with a pool, all transaction fees will go there? For how long would you be receiving transaction fees? Just the period you are mining for? I am with bitminter

[daytrader420]

Some pools keep the tx-fees.

What they share amongst pool workers, is the block reward. The block reward is at a consistent 25 btc per block for the next 3 and a half years.

If you are solo-mining, you would keep the tx-fees. The fee-to-block reward ratio has increased over time, so that is some incentive for solo mining.

The downsides are if you don't have the proper equiptment, it's just highly unlikely that solo mining will ever pay off.

[DannyHamilton]

Transaction fees are included in the block reward of the block that contains the transaction.  The block reward consists of the block subsidy (currently 25 BTC) and the sum of all transaction fees from all transactions selected for that block.

If you are solo mining, you choose the bitcoin address where you want the block reward paid, and if you solve a block, you receive the reward from that block as the address you've chosen.

If you are mining in a pool, then it really depends on how the pool is set up.

Some pools pay the block reward to the pool operation, and the pool operation then splits it up and pays out to each miner based on the rules of the pool.  Some of these pools keep the transaction fees for themselves and only split up the subsidy, other pools split up both the subsidy and the fees.

I'm not sure if there are any pools that create blocks that pay the reward directly to the participating miners.  It would seem that it would be difficult to keep the payout balanced properly with that method.