Compulsory fee in the Mac client?

[ConfusedEnthusiast]

Hi everyone,

Apologies if this is a dumb/old question - I've tried searching for it but searching for "fee" is rather a mug's game.

I just upgraded to the 0.3.21 client on my Mac, and did a simple transaction of 0.05 to myself. I've got my client set to a zero fee by default; as I understand it, this will cause a delay in the transaction verification due to nobody wanting to verify my blocks for free. That's fair enough - like when using a cheque, for me the time taking to verify is not overly important.

But I would swear blind the client just forced me to pay a fee. It came up with a little window saying "This transaction is over the size limit. You can still send it for a fee of 0.01, which goes to the nodes that process your transaction and helps to support the network. Do you want to pay the fee?"

I clicked no, and it didn't appear to go forward. I tried again, and clicked yes, and it went.

Have I misunderstood here? Is something screwy going on, or is this new policy? (Either way I don't like it, but let's see what's happened first!)

Thanks in advance,

Michael

PS If it is policy, I can understand the logic but really dislike it.

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[PiGames]

The new client did in fact introduce a standard fee for smaller transactions (forget what the cutoff is) so you're not going crazy.
I believe it's in place now to get people accustomed to paying very small micro fees (to support miners) when the block reward starts to drop. But don't quote me on that

[ConfusedEnthusiast]

Thanks for the reply - and it's always good news to hear that I'm sane (even if it's probably not true :p)

I don't like it one bit. As I understand it, the higher the fee, the quicker (probabilistically) miners or other users will verify your transaction. If you force people to always pay a fee, then you're distorting the market: people who pay bugger all will get punished with long verification times, and eventually some equilibrium value of a fee will be reached that meets the needs of people who want fast verification and miners who want paying for services.

And those of us who don't care about the verification times for certain transactions will get screwed over, especially for a transaction of say 0.05 with a 0.01 fee!

[error]

The fee amount is being dropped significantly in the next release, though I still think the option to send without a fee (and accept the significant delay) should be present.

[Gavin Andresen]

Yes, the 0.3.21 release will charge a fee if you want to do things like send 0.05 bitcoins to yourself.

Why?  Because some people were sending 0.05 BTC to themselves over and over and over again, wasting everybody's disk space, bandwidth, and CPU time.  The fee is there to reveal the hidden costs of sending lots of tiny transactions.

Next release the normal fee will be dropped from 0.01 BTC to 0.0005 BTC.

The long-term goal is to figure out how to make fees dynamic; maybe in a few months you'll get a slider that lets you choose fees on a transaction-by-transaction basis, and will show you how long you're likely to wait for various amounts of fees...

[romkyns]

Yes, the 0.3.21 release will charge a fee if you want to do things like send 0.05 bitcoins to yourself.
[...]
Next release the normal fee will be dropped from 0.01 BTC to 0.0005 BTC.

This hasn't happened - 0.3.22 still wants 0.01 BTC, even though I already have a 0.001 BTC specified as the default fee. Is this still on the table?

[AllYourBase]

So wait, what if the miners set the fee?  And perhaps there'd even be an option for them to specify a percentage rather than a static number?  Arbitrary fees from on high seems odd to me.  I'm using the old client due to this.