5.70 fee on a 70 BTC transaction?

[bitoption]

Clearly the fee is way, way too high. Can we all agree on that?

I think if it were .057 BTC, or .57BTC nobody would be complaining. (Let's recall that's roughly $5 US today, a lot!)

I also think it's outrageous that the most recent client enforces this behavior -- let people float their transactions out there and wait longer for confirmation if they want to! That's how the fee was intended to function originally if I recall -- a way to incent miners to take it, and speed up confirmation of the transfer.

There should always be the notion of a 'bulk' transfer, 4th class postage which costs very, very little to nothing.

[mestar]

Exactly, or maybe I would just refuse to accept them. According to the same logic, freshly mined BTC should command a premium over those of unknown composition!
And there´s your break in fungibility. Let´s assume I run a shop, what do I do? Raise my prices by x% to compensate for the risk? Refuse to accept certain bitcoins? 

I don't think this would be a problem.  Once they are consolidated, your transactions are back to normal size..

For example, the next transaction from my monster transaction was just 258 bytes:

http://blockexplorer.com/tx/597359518fbdcc36fcf6a6b5dedb0196111fbf64992ab8e1237633f9538ceb46#i951162

[Dude65535]

Interesting, does this happen organically? Is there some mechanism through which coins are healed or does someone have to actively do it?
If there is such a mechanism, is the whole process(splitting up of bitcoins through transactions and "healing") divergent or convergent? Are more coins(/as many) being "healed" than are split? Or are more coins being split than reassembled?  In other words is the problem self correcting?

Two ways for it to happen you can spend them and pay the fee, they will arrive as a single unit. Alternately you can send small batches to another address you control (say at mybitcoin, mtgox or bitcoin running on another computer you own) and then send in larger chunks from there till you can send them all at once with no fee. You have to wait some time between stages of this process for the transactions to mature to the point where they won't need a fee just because of age.

[Alex Beckenham]

Let´s assume I run a shop, what do I do? Raise my prices by x% to compensate for the risk? Refuse to accept certain bitcoins?  

If you're running a shop which sell things for 70 BTC for example, then this issue of small change won't affect you directly. It'll affect the customer (who pays the MINER more in fees if using small change). You'll still just get one chunk of 70 BTC. What's your risk?

[Gandlaf]

Two ways for it to happen you can spend them and pay the fee, they will arrive as a single unit. Alternately you can send small batches to another address you control (say at mybitcoin, mtgox or bitcoin running on another computer you own) and then send in larger chunks from there till you can send them all at once with no fee. You have to wait some time between stages of this process for the transactions to mature to the point where they won't need a fee just because of age.

Thanks to all of you for the explanations. I think I understand: Large fees only occur at the point where lots of small payments are combined, subsequent transactions are not affected.
Sorry if I´ve wasted your time, but thanks for your patience.

[tacomaster]

I still don't quite understand. I have but .02BTC. an attempt to send .01 of my .02 coins shows the error 'this transaction is over the size limit, you can still send it for a fee of 0.01'. what gives?

[bitoption]

You need a different client. I would expect this to get amended in the next release; it's broken as-is: that behavior is inappropriate, although agreed on here in the forums.

[imperi]

Sorry if someone already made this clear -

If I wait over 24 hours, will I not have any fees with future transactions?

I have about 10 received payments, from a mining group, and when I sent 0.05 out to someone it made me give a 0.01 fee.

[mapwow]

If I wait over 24 hours, will I not have any fees with future transactions?

If your priority is high enough you will not have to pay a transaction fee. Things that increase your priority: 1) more confirmations on the coins you're using 2) larger value of the coins 3) smaller size of the data. Details are available at
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction_fees

You can also look into using a free transaction relay: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Free_transaction_relay_policy