Lower the minimum Transfer fee?! (Currently 0,0005BTC)

[Bytas]

Hi, i was wondering if it is possible to lower the minimum transaction fee for bitcoin.
It currently is 0,0005BTC(500µBTC) and there is no way to change it as far as i know (i'm still e newb). Even if i lower the value in my options, my client gives a message and charges 500µBTC anyway.
Wile 500µBTC would have been a perfectly reasonable price half a year ago, the price of bitcoin rose 8 times since then, and so the relative transaction fee in % to the average size of a transaction did too!

I want to organise a bitcoin party to introduce the currency to people i know.
The plan for this is to award 1mBTC to everyone each time they buy a beer (yes, we are student and we like to drink ) and the person who earned the most mBTC at the end of the evening gets a prize, everyone may also keep the bitcoin earned to get them started on their wallet.
This concept requires me to transfer small amounts of BTC to numerous new adresses and print those out as paper wallets (kinda like money)
With the current transaction fee of 500µBTC, i will lose a whopping 50% of my money to transaction fees, and that's just not viable.
Using bigger amounts to hand out isn't an option either, as we still want to offer good prizes for a consumption and don't plan on running loss on the event.
On top of that, if people who are interested in bitcoin want to take all the BTC they earned from the paper wallets and store them in one account for ease of use, they will lose another 50% of their money. Total loss will be 2/3rd of the money i invested.

one of the advantages of BTC is its low transaction fees, but arn't we slowly taking away that advantage by not adjusting the transaction fee to the current value on a regular basis?

[DeathAndTaxes]

The minimum mandatory fee FOR LOW PRIORITY txs is an anti-DOS mechanism. If it was modified to allow you to spam the network with massive amounts of tiny low value tx at low/no cost it would also allow an attacker to do the same thing.

While the fee may be lowered again in the future it can't be lowered to a point where there is negligible cost for tx of dubious value as that would undermine its anti-DOS purpose.  BTW it was lowered to the current amount when Bitcoin broke through $20 (the first time).  So lowering it to 0.0001 when the exchange rate is above $100 would provide roughly the same anti-DOS protection.

You can send tx without any fee if:
a) the input to the tx are "1 bitcoin day" old (high priority)
b) the total size of the tx is 10KB or less
c) each output is 0.01 BTC or more.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction_fees

Remember all of the above applies only to the ANTI-DOS min mandatory fee.  High priority txs meeting the a,b,c criteria above are not REQUIRED to include a fee however miners are free to choose which tx to include in a block and generally will choose paying tx over free tx so high priority tx which don't include any fee may see the confirmation of the tx delayed by hours.  Low priority tx which violate the ANTI-DOS rules (requires running a custom/patched client) may see their tx never confirmed.

[proudhon]

Might be a good idea to put a mining fee section on bitconi.org to give new folks quick access to some basic information on the fee structure, how much they can reliably send without fees, etc.

[zif33rs]

^ this.


 Even with your explanation DT it still alot for a new person to wrap their head around.


zif

[proudhon]

It could be something really simple.  Maybe just a page that has at the top in big text the current standard fee, just so people even know what it is.  Maybe have it converted to currency off to the side so people can see and have a better sense, in ordinary currency, how little it really is.  Then below that have a paragraph about typical limitations on non-fee transactions.

[nevafuse]

You can always use brainwallet.org/#tx which has no fee requirements.  You will need to have access to your private key.  No guarantee the transaction will make it into a block, but you could try.

[Atruk]

Hi, i was wondering if it is possible to lower the minimum transaction fee for bitcoin.
It currently is 0,0005BTC(500µBTC) and there is no way to change it as far as i know (i'm still e newb). Even if i lower the value in my options, my client gives a message and charges 500µBTC anyway.
Wile 500µBTC would have been a perfectly reasonable price half a year ago, the price of bitcoin rose 8 times since then, and so the relative transaction fee in % to the average size of a transaction did too!

I want to organise a bitcoin party to introduce the currency to people i know.
The plan for this is to award 1mBTC to everyone each time they buy a beer (yes, we are student and we like to drink ) and the person who earned the most mBTC at the end of the evening gets a prize, everyone may also keep the bitcoin earned to get them started on their wallet.
This concept requires me to transfer small amounts of BTC to numerous new adresses and print those out as paper wallets (kinda like money)
With the current transaction fee of 500µBTC, i will lose a whopping 50% of my money to transaction fees, and that's just not viable.
Using bigger amounts to hand out isn't an option either, as we still want to offer good prizes for a consumption and don't plan on running loss on the event.
On top of that, if people who are interested in bitcoin want to take all the BTC they earned from the paper wallets and store them in one account for ease of use, they will lose another 50% of their money. Total loss will be 2/3rd of the money i invested.

one of the advantages of BTC is its low transaction fees, but arn't we slowly taking away that advantage by not adjusting the transaction fee to the current value on a regular basis?

I gave up on the mBTC faucets a while ago, but where's this party?

Something I did recently, well actually the beginning of this month was I gave several friends each 0.5 BTC and had them compete with each other in the realm of sports gambling ([urlhttp://www.bitbet.us]BitBet.us[/url], bitcoinsports.eu, and a few other sites as well as whatever they felt safe with). At the conclusion of the year or when everyone goes broke the person with the most coin wins a Natty Daddy.

[greyhawk]

At the conclusion of the year or when everyone goes broke the person with the most coin wins a Natty Daddy.

Why does the winner get poisoned? 

[Gavin Andresen]

Hi, i was wondering if it is possible to lower the minimum transaction fee for bitcoin.

Sure.

First, you need to make sure miners will accept bitcoins with the lower fee.  So lobby your favorite miner or mining pool to set the -mintxfee=  parameter to something lower than the default 0.0005 BTC-per-kilobyte; you can ask them if they will increase the size of the blocks they're creating and include more free transactions, too (those are settings they control).

Then, if you're using Bitcoin-Qt, you can set the transaction fee in the Preferences/Options dialog.

Right now, network peers won't relay low-priority transactions that include a fee of less than 0.0001 BTC, so that is as low as you should go. Fixing that is near the top of the (long) TODO list, but I really want to fix it correctly so we developers get out of the business of deciding what the transaction fees should be, and instead let the network decide.

If you generate a small number of high-bitcoin-value transactions (e.g. you have more than 1 BTC in your wallet and make a few purchases a week) then you should probably leave the Pay transaction fee setting at zero; Bitcoin-Qt will send your transactions without a fee, which will be just fine.

[DannyHamilton]

- snip -
However, an attacker can create custom transactions and spam the network anyway. It does not affect them at all.
- snip -

Not true.  The current reference client (that almost every full peer runs) will refuse to relay the transactions that exceed the "spam" threshold and don't include a fee.  An attacker would need to convince a significant percentage of the network to run his modified client rather than the reference client if they wanted to be successful in such an attack.

While the fee may be lowered again in the future

Lowered by whom?

Lowered by any programer that publishes a client that has a lower fee requirement and convinces others to run the client.  Realistically this will typically mean whoever controls bitcoin.org, since the client published there is the client that most people will choose to use. However, if enough people become frustrated enough with the current client, there is no reason they can't switch to a new source.

So, when is the Protocol getting published so that I or other people can program their own fully compatible Bitcoin nodes? I must've missed the official announcement.

You can find it here:
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin

At the moment the source code is the protocol (that's why it's commonly called the "reference" client).  Feel free to modify it however you like.  Feel free to write up any documentation you like as well.

[zif33rs]

Gavin..you mean make sure the miners will accept the transactions? Because as a miner i'm happy to accepts everyone's bitcoins.   

[candoo]

Whats the deal with 0,0005BTC per transaction? 0,0005BTC sounds fair to me!

[mai77]

the fees are a bloody rip-off!  

a huge fraud  

[Bytas]

Whats the deal with 0,0005BTC per transaction? 0,0005BTC sounds fair to me!

Did you read my post at all candoo?

[grue]

the fees are a bloody rip-off!

a huge fraud 

cool story

[Atruk]

At the conclusion of the year or when everyone goes broke the person with the most coin wins a Natty Daddy.

Why does the winner get poisoned? 

Because if they can't find the means to turn bitcoins into any other liquor, they kind of deserve it.

[greyhawk]

That makes a scary amount of sense.

[Fiyasko]

Its key for people to keep in mind that A, B and C all must be true, Not just one of the three
my main problem is that my client always tells me a differant fucking fee, Like right now on 0.8.1 it costs me .003!!! per transaction, Like WHAT THE FUCK

[Rothgar]

Hi,

 i will lose a whopping 50% of my money to transaction fees

Something you might want to try is send the btc to all the other addresses in one transaction.  With this method your transaction will have approximately 1kB for every 5 outputs so if you wanted 100 1 mBTC papers this would be about 20 kB.  I would include a fee of .0005X20 for this transaction.  That is .01 BTC (.0105 to be safe) that reduces your 50% expenses to 10%.  That's about the best you can do right now.

edit:  Oh and you could make the papers at the end of the game so that you could make a few 3 mBTC or 5 mBTC papers for no extra charge. 

[DeathAndTaxes]

Its key for people to keep in mind that A, B and C all must be true, Not just one of the three
my main problem is that my client always tells me a differant fucking fee, Like right now on 0.8.1 it costs me .003!!! per transaction, Like WHAT THE FUCK

The min fee is PER KB.