Why does everyone want to use Bitcoin for free? It's a financial tool for transferring money that has a built in cost for the bank (miners) that's sending the money. Why is it necessary to screw them out of their cost of doing business? Give them a nice healthy fee now and get used to the fee that you'll be paying when the built in mining reward drops to an inconsequential amount in about 8 years and the demand on the network skyrockets. At that point you'd be lucky to get a transaction confirmed for a .36 Btc fee.
facepalm
your answer seems to be the opposite of what i expected. im guessing the original owner of the account sold it to a noob.
here is my reply.
addressing the OP's question
the fee's are based on the demand(how many people want to send a tx straight away around the same time you do) and the supply(how much data space is available in a block to allow a transaction in)
think of it like a train..
if there are 5000 passengers(transactions) waiting for a train(block) but only enough standing room on the train for 2500 people. the ticket hustlers who have the 2500 tickets can charge a premium to those who want it.. leaving other people waiting for the next train.
the only problem is that the next train might also see a new set of 5000 people walking onto the platform. so those not wanting to buy a premium ticket wont get on the next one. after a day of waiting you exit the station on your feet(dropped out of mempool) and you can if you want to come back again this time with money to by a ticket(rebroadcast transaction with fee). however you need to manually keep an eye on the current estimated "bid" price people are paying and pay a little higher. afterall other people will be looking at the same estimate too (causing a fee war of increasing fee's when demand is high)
the solution is not to argue that people should pay up or shut up due to fears that the train company wont get paid healthily in a decade or too.. but to ask the train company to add more carraiges to add more capacity to allow more passengers cheaper, which when combined adds up to a healthy income.
trying to start a fee war now when the blockreward is the income and the fee is just a bonus is stupid.. it will be over a decade before that flips and the fee becomes more important. so there is no need to piss customers off now for something that can be controlled and offset naturally and slowly over the next few years/decades.
in short.
untill extra capacity is added to blocks your stuck with the fee war so check this website
https://bitcoinfees.21.co/and remember to read the page. the numbers at the top are not fee per transaction but fee per byte of a transaction
at time of posting:
The fastest and cheapest transaction fee is currently 80 satoshis/byte, shown in green at the top.
For the median transaction size of 258 bytes*, this results in a fee of 20,640 satoshis (0.11$).
*small 1-2 input, 1-2outputs
as to the guy named "question authority"
i think he forgets that bitcoin was invented to help the unbanked and those that do not want to be paying high fee's just to move their money around..
seems "question authority" has now become "silence and accept, and pay for authority"
i have nothing against paying for what you use. but when there is a way to code something to offset costs to allow cheaper use, and also spread the cost to help everyone out, especially decades before that "cost" is an actual need. yet the current situation is not to go forward with that and instead shut up and put up with fee's or F-off if you dont want to pay.. then i find people have really lost the plot
