Exceeds size limit?

[Ascholten]

Im trying to send a transaction to ONE address of about 2 btc.  I am being told that my transaction exceeds the size limit and do I want to pay extra to send it?
What is causing this?  I though you were over 1 btc roughly that there were no fees?

Thank you for your help.
Aaron

[FreeMoney]

Im trying to send a transaction to ONE address of about 2 btc.  I am being told that my transaction exceeds the size limit and do I want to pay extra to send it?
What is causing this?  I though you were over 1 btc roughly that there were no fees?

Thank you for your help.
Aaron

It's a little bit complicated.

Short story:

Your wallet is made up of a lot of small inputs and constructing the transaction takes a lot of them and it takes up a lot more space than a simple transaction so you need to pay like a penny. And you don't really -need- to you can always find your own block and put it in that or find someone else will, but it's not really worth doing that since we're talking about a penny.

[DeathAndTaxes]

The "size" it is referring to is the physical size (in bytes) of the transaction.  The size is dependent more on the # of inputs (and outputs) not the number of addresses.  Your 1 BTC is likely made up of dozens (or maybe hundreds) of tiny unspent outputs making the size of the tx relatively large.  So a tx sending 100,000 BTC to 4 addresses using 1 input is "smaller" than one sending 1 BTC to 1 address using 50 unspent input.

Honestly as FreeMoney said we are talking about a fraction of a penny here and it helps to fund a secure network.

[Ascholten]

I was just curious on it, and its 7 cents and ill pay it.

I was just under the impression that once you hit a btc or so it's free.

so once I spend all those tiny ones, I won't get hit again on it because they are now condnsed into just the 'one' big transaction right?

Aaron

[monkee]

interesting, i'd been wondering that myself

[FreeMoney]

I was just curious on it, and its 7 cents and ill pay it.

I was just under the impression that once you hit a btc or so it's free.

so once I spend all those tiny ones, I won't get hit again on it because they are now condnsed into just the 'one' big transaction right?

Aaron

Wow, you must have received a lot of small transactions? Are you sure it isn't .0005 which would be ~$.007?

That's right if your wallet is cleared of those they won't cause it to ask for a fee. There are other ways to need a fee though, like sending inputs that you just received. The bigger they are the less long you need to wait to avoid the fee, one "bitcoin day" is the general rule, so 12 hours if it is 2BTC, 1 hour if it is 24BTC. That fee will certainly only be .0005BTC though.

[Remember remember the 5th of November]

Given the limit of 21 million bitcoins and the world population is over 7 billion, I'd like you all to think if 0.005 is a penny when your monthly salary could one day be 0.0000001 bitcoins or less.

[BkkCoins]

Given the limit of 21 million bitcoins and the world population is over 7 billion, I'd like you all to think if 0.005 is a penny when your monthly salary could one day be 0.0000001 bitcoins or less.

The devs have stated that the fee will be adjusted as needed when price goes up. I believe you can also alter the code on your own client to bypass fee conditions when sending but I'm not sure where the line is drawn for validation by other nodes or miners.

(The purpose of the fee for OP is to prevent a spam attack on the blockchain by a malicious user sending huge qty of trivially small transactions. )

[FreeMoney]

Given the limit of 21 million bitcoins and the world population is over 7 billion, I'd like you all to think if 0.005 is a penny when your monthly salary could one day be 0.0000001 bitcoins or less.

The devs have stated that the fee will be adjusted as needed when price goes up. I believe you can also alter the code on your own client to bypass fee conditions when sending but I'm not sure where the line is drawn for validation by other nodes or miners.

(The purpose of the fee for OP is to prevent a spam attack on the blockchain by a malicious user sending huge qty of trivially small transactions. )

To clarify for anyone who doesn't know, the devs can set the behavior of the client they publish and they've done fine so far, it people ever want nodes with different forwarding rules they don't need any permission, just their own code. I believe a lot of miners already run custom code, but I don't think there are many with significantly different rules.

[gmaxwell]

Given the limit of 21 million bitcoins and the world population is over 7 billion, I'd like you all to think if 0.005 is a penny when your monthly salary could one day be 0.0000001 bitcoins or less.

This isn't one of the rules that can't be changed— like the block validation rules— and it has been changed before— the base fee was lowered from 0.01 to 0.0005 about a year ago.

What happens is that your peers (well, practically all nodes on the network) will just drop transactions that don't meet the rules and because your client knows this it will decline to generate any transactions that do.  To change the rule an new version that has a lower limit is released and then after that version is widely deployed (so that it's likely that everyone has at least one or two peers running it) the next new version comes out that imposes the lower limit locally too.

[DeathAndTaxes]

Given the limit of 21 million bitcoins and the world population is over 7 billion, I'd like you all to think if 0.005 is a penny when your monthly salary could one day be 0.0000001 bitcoins or less.

This isn't one of the rules that can't be changed— like the block validation rules— and it has been changed before— the base fee was lowered from 0.01 to 0.0005 about a year ago.

What happens is that your peers (well, practically all nodes on the network) will just drop transactions that don't meet the rules and because your client knows this it will decline to generate any transactions that do.  To change the rule an new version that has a lower limit is released and then after that version is widely deployed (so that it's likely that everyone has at least one or two peers running it) the next new version comes out that imposes the lower limit locally too.

Also I would imagine at some point there won't be a need for any mandatory min fee.  3 or 4 subsidy reductions and the "fee marketplace" will ensure that to have any realistic chance of a confirmation any time soon you will need to pay a fee.  The "min mandatory fee" will be a relic of the past.  At some point in the future nodes may save CPU cycles and stop even performing the check.

The need for a min fee is a side effect of the large block subsidy.   Without a true free market on transactions (due to the distorting effect of the subsidy) there is a need to protect the network from spam (as most miners in the past included every single tx in a block).

[deepceleron]

I think the opposite of above. We don't want to worry end-users about guessing what fee might work for them. Users will continued to be notified when their transaction will require the minimum fee, and in addition I see in the future Bitcoin prompting the user for a "recommended" fee if they need efficient processing, calculated when Bitcoin sees that that many blocks worth of pending fee-paying transactions are also waiting for blockchain inclusion. By such an "automatic bidding" process for quick inclusion (while still keeping blocksize small and inclusion scarce), transaction fee subsidies for miners may more rapidly replace the mining reward.

The "size limit" message still confuses users about the purpose. I recommended better language long ago:

The Bitcoin client is usually giving you an accurate message, but one that doesn't make sense unless you understand how Bitcoin works; that the fees are assessed based on how many kilobytes in size the transfer message is. It also will give this same message when it is not the size, but the newness of the coins or the smallness/spammyness of the payment or the sender's payment (receiving) history that requires a fee, so in that aspect it could be clearer to just remove the "size limit" part of the fee message.

A better catch-all English translation:
"Due to the use of recently received funds, the size of this transaction in KB, or the transaction amount, a fee of 0.0xxx is required to ensure your Bitcoin transfer is reliably processed. Proceed?"

Further reading of when Bitcoin requires the 0.0005 per-KB minimum fee may be found on the transaction fee wiki page under priority.

[DeathAndTaxes]

I think the opposite of above. We don't want to worry end-users about guessing what fee might work for them. Users will continued to be notified when their transaction will require the minimum fee, and in addition I see in the future Bitcoin prompting the user for a "recommended" fee if they need efficient processing, calculated when Bitcoin sees that that many blocks worth of pending fee-paying transactions are also waiting for blockchain inclusion. By such an "automatic bidding" process for quick inclusion (while still keeping blocksize small and inclusion scarce), transaction fee subsidies for miners may more rapidly replace the mining reward.

The "size limit" message still confuses users about the purpose. I recommended better language long ago:

The Bitcoin client is usually giving you an accurate message, but one that doesn't make sense unless you understand how Bitcoin works; that the fees are assessed based on how many kilobytes in size the transfer message is. It also will give this same message when it is not the size, but the newness of the coins or the smallness/spammyness of the payment or the sender's payment (receiving) history that requires a fee, so in that aspect it could be clearer to just remove the "size limit" part of the fee message.

A better catch-all English translation:
"Due to the use of recently received funds, the size of this transaction in KB, or the transaction amount, a fee of 0.0xxx is required to ensure your Bitcoin transfer is reliably processed. Proceed?"

I think you misunderstood what I was writing.  In some future scenario where 99.9% of transaction pay a 0.001 BTC fee or more to get into the next block and the mandatory fee is 0.00005 BTC the mandatory fee is no longer serving a purpose.  It can simply be removed completely.  The purpose of the mandatory fee is to prevent a spam attack and if there is enough real competition for block space such that actual fees are higher than the mandatory fee it is redundant.

[deepceleron]

I think you misunderstood what I was writing.  In some future scenario where 99.9% of transaction pay a 0.001 BTC fee or more to get into the next block and the mandatory fee is 0.00005 BTC the mandatory fee is no longer serving a purpose.  It can simply be removed completely.  The purpose of the mandatory fee is to prevent a spam attack and if there is enough real competition for block space such that actual fees are higher than the mandatory fee it is redundant.

The minimum fees will still serve a purpose, otherwise spam attacks and zero-fee opportunists will ensure blocks are always full even during lulls or non-busy times.

[DeathAndTaxes]

I think you misunderstood what I was writing.  In some future scenario where 99.9% of transaction pay a 0.001 BTC fee or more to get into the next block and the mandatory fee is 0.00005 BTC the mandatory fee is no longer serving a purpose.  It can simply be removed completely.  The purpose of the mandatory fee is to prevent a spam attack and if there is enough real competition for block space such that actual fees are higher than the mandatory fee it is redundant.

The minimum fees will still serve a purpose, otherwise spam attacks and zero-fee opportunists will ensure blocks are always full even during lulls or non-busy times.

Not if a miner doens't include them.  As miners get more and more sophisticated I doubt you will see many including giants numbers of spam-like free tx especially when the block subsidy is negligible and they are doing extra work to hurt the network for no profit.  Still it doesn't really matter if it never gets dropped (remember it is just client level rule, the protocol doesn't care).  Fast forward 10 years I predict most people won't even know/care about the so called min tx fees as most tx will need to pay a fee to have timely service and clients will be in good communication with pools of miners to educate users on what fee is necessary (mandatory or not) in order to ensure timely inclusion.

[justusranvier]

Fast forward 10 years

10 years from now we have no idea who is going to be mining and for what motivation.

It's possible that all mining will be done by businesses that depend on bitcoin instead of by pools of individuals. They might not even charge fees because operating the mining rigs is just rolled into the cost of doing business.

[DeathAndTaxes]

So a business which is willing to mine for free because their entire business depends on the success of bitcoin will CHOOSE to include massive quantities of spam which would damage the very network their are mining for free to protect?

If so there is nothing that can stop that.  You do know that no node (even this free business mining node) is required to enforce the mandatory tx fee rules.  They are simply rules as the client level.  A block full of nothing but 0 fee, low priority transactions is still valid and will be seen as valid by the rest of the network (even those who implement mandatory tx fee rules).

[justusranvier]

So a business which is willing to mine for free because their entire business depends on the success of bitcoin will CHOOSE to include massive quantities of spam which would damage the very network their are mining for free to protect?

We don't know.

In 10 years Walmart might be operating their business via Bitcoin, and the transaction volume they will deal with might make any spam a regular person could generate look like a rounding error. A lot can change in 10 years.

[cunicula]

The need for a min fee is a side effect of the large block subsidy.   Without a true free market on transactions (due to the distorting effect of the subsidy) there is a need to protect the network from spam (as most miners in the past included every single tx in a block).

There is no market determination going on and there is no prospect of future market determination either (except through monopoly). It will always be central planning.
The best you could do is create a voting mechanism to guide central planning.

[cunicula]

So a business which is willing to mine for free because their entire business depends on the success of bitcoin will CHOOSE to include massive quantities of spam which would damage the very network their are mining for free to protect?

It depends on how many businesses there are. A monopoly or perhaps an oligopoly arrangement could be stable. Other arrangements lead to massive spam and system destruction. Thus the use of central planning.