I say it again: REDUCE THE FEES!

[Rincewind]

Eventually miner will be paid only with transactions

Then our great-great-grandchildren can solve that problem when it comes up 127 years from now. The initial recommended fee structure was an arbitrary number defined when a few people held all the coins and traded very little. That day has passed.

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[Gabi]

99% of the total bitcoins are mined in like 30 years. So it is a problem for us 

[Rincewind]

99% of the total bitcoins are mined in like 30 years. So it is a problem for us 

Fair enough.

Regardless, someday soon perhaps *none* of us will be mining. Don't think Visa, Western Union, or PayPal are sitting on their hands watching miners take 'their' money.

An entire warehouse of ASICs would be rather trivial for Visa.

[mobodick]

I have to disagree (though I don't like paying fees as much as the next guy)  the issue is the miners need to get paid.  These are the same guys bidding 30,000 dollars on Ebay for 1200 mining machine because they are factoring in fees for paying that massive markup.

Hey look, if miners want an arms race fine, but why should i have to pay extra for that?
At the moment bitcoin is becoming uninteresting as a currency at a rate faster than you can say 'obsolete'.

[dg2010]

The initial recommended fee structure was an arbitrary number defined when a few people held all the coins and traded very little. That day has passed.

Exactly.

I wish people wouldn't be so reluctant to change within the Bitcoin code. The idea that the structure set out by Satoshi in the beginning is perfect is complete bullshit.

It is inevitable that fees must be reduced and it's inevitable that other changes will also have to take place if Bitcoin is to grow.

[kerogre256]

I ask again: why? If you want to spam the network, you're going to have to pay a fee. Rightly so.

Why ? I try send today 0.01(don't have much more ) bitcoin to armory developer and was not able because minimum fee was 0.0005 and this is rip off.

[phatsphere]

higher fees are necessary, sooner or later. bitcoin will not be the best tool for online micro transactions, hence don't use it for it.

This is a pathetic argument because depending on the value of a BTC, these "micro transactions" you talk off might be quite valuable. At which point you won't be able to spend your BTC because the fees are so high.

No, it's just the truth -- sorry that you might have been disillusioned. There is limited space (google "tragedy of the commons"), and this space is not arbitrarily inflatable. You should rather think the other way around and only use the current bitcoin network for large transactions.

A possible future vision is a situation, where several specific altchains (or other payment providers) provide cheaper services with their own unique branding and use the current larger and established bitcoin network as their common clearing house.

[kerogre256]

higher fees are necessary, sooner or later. bitcoin will not be the best tool for online micro transactions, hence don't use it for it.

This is a pathetic argument because depending on the value of a BTC, these "micro transactions" you talk off might be quite valuable. At which point you won't be able to spend your BTC because the fees are so high.

No, it's just the truth -- sorry that you might have been disillusioned. There is limited space (google "tragedy of the commons"), and this space is not arbitrarily inflatable. You should rather think the other way around and only use the current bitcoin network for large transactions.

A possible future vision is a situation, where several specific altchains (or other payment providers) provide cheaper services with their own unique branding and use the current larger and established bitcoin network as their common clearing house.

It just happened  10 minut ago, I was not able send 0.01 bitcoin to armory dev due 0.0005 fee...

[Frozenlock]

Definitively time to reduce the default fees.
(For some reason I can't even send from blockchain.info for less than 0.0005, even with custom transaction.)

The minimum fees in place have nothing to do with paying the miners: it's an anti-spam security.
Even a fraction of a cent is sufficient to prevent that.

*Eventually* fees will be (if everything go according to plan) a way to pay for the miners.
Yet the situation is still being discussed: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=157141.0.
Until we reach the current block limit, fees are purely an anti-spam policy.

[Eri]

higher fees are necessary, sooner or later. bitcoin will not be the best tool for online micro transactions, hence don't use it for it.

This is a pathetic argument because depending on the value of a BTC, these "micro transactions" you talk off might be quite valuable. At which point you won't be able to spend your BTC because the fees are so high.

No, it's just the truth -- sorry that you might have been disillusioned. There is limited space (google "tragedy of the commons"), and this space is not arbitrarily inflatable. You should rather think the other way around and only use the current bitcoin network for large transactions.

A possible future vision is a situation, where several specific altchains (or other payment providers) provide cheaper services with their own unique branding and use the current larger and established bitcoin network as their common clearing house.

Bitcoin has to be able to do it all without an altcoin otherwise that means it cant scale and wont succeed. One of bitcoins biggest rallying points is that it has low to non existent fees. everything you suggest leads to "well lets just pack it in and quit, this project is flawed" Thankfully its not, you just dont understand that it can scale to handle all transactions. the fee is a anti spam filter, its throttle is the fact those bitcoins cost money. even at 1 penny per transaction, in time when the number of transactions increase, the amount of money per block will go up. dont forget that the profit from mining remains roughly the same regardless of the money from blocks. as the amount from blocks goes down, miners quit. as the amount from blocks go up, more join. while its a nice idea to put more money in blocks so there is more going to miners so more miners mine... there has to be a limit to it. the money has to come from somewhere and raising fees to do it at the expense of bitcoin itself will simply make it less attractive to new users. "Use bitcoin! the fees are higher then paypal and dwolla!" will not get people to use it. we have to keep fees low to keep it attractive.

[Syke]

I just sent $400 by Western Union to China. It cost me $25.
I could send that same $400 by Bitcoin to China for $.07.

Clearly, the fees are far too low.

[edmundedgar]

Bitcoin.org says:

Cheap micro payments

Bitcoin offers the lowest payment processing fees for any type of transaction, including micro-payments. Which means that it can also be used to design and implement new creative online services that could not exist before only because of financial limitations.

http://bitcoin.org/en/bitcoin-for-developers

In practice this is not true right now. Some transactions are far too expensive. For these purposes, Bitcoin is broken. It sounds like it should be trivial to fix, but some people actually seem to be suggesting it shouldn't be fixed.

It would be helpful if we could get some consensus on whether cheap transactions are actually a goal or not. If they're not, people who don't think we should be prompting people to pay multiple-digits of US cents to move a tiny bit of information from one place to another can start working on another solution.

[marcus_of_augustus]

Bitcoin is simply not suitable for micro transactions. That's all. It is, however, bad that bitcoin.org is misleading people on this one.

Yep.

[Eri]

Bitcoin is simply not suitable for micro transactions. That's all. It is, however, bad that bitcoin.org is misleading people on this one.

Thats such a load of bull. it was suited for it just fine when the USD value of bitcoins were lower.

Dont a few of the devs control that website, previously satoshi himself(?) im willing to bet they didnt type that up by accident.



(general post)
When dealing with bitcoin people have this tendency to think they fully understand something when they dont and they go on to claim X, Y and Z. its most common and easy to spot in random comments on other websites, im sure everyone has come across pro bitcoin comments that are wrong on several levels. its not that its done on purpose, they just think they understand how it works when they dont.

This issue with fees seems to be one of those issues that people seem to not understand due in part to some subtlety in understanding what blockchain spam really is, and what it is not. as well as not understanding how fees affect miners and how those fees will eventually replace the block reward. not to mention how pruning will help with the blockchain size when its implemented.

Id like to also note, that while i agree this should be left to 'the people' to decide. There is a problem with that. if the people dont fully understand what they are voting for and make a bad decision based on bad information then its not helping anyone. in cases like this id hope that the devs at the top that understand the situation and problem make the smart decision and simply make the fees 100% adjustable client side. while this wont force miners to change their settings it would certainly set up the network where people could send what they want and the miners would be able to choose their own threshold for fees. instead its currently dictated to them by a network that makes it impossible for people to choose what fee they want to send even if it wont be accepted currently(this can change!).

[franky1]

as i said before the satoshi dice is showing everyone an example of the future. where most transactions will be done in satoshi's due to bitcoin value being many hundreds of dollars each.

allowing fee's to be high to block/ignore satoshi dice transactions is not a good thing now or for the future of bitcoin. It's just a lazy and ignorant way to avoid thinking about the future of bitcoin, purely for selfish and personal profit of miners today.

think of the future. develop the clients/miners to accept satoshi payments easier without causing the network to struggle.

i want to ensure that in a couple years i can buy chewing gum at walmart for under a dollar (when valued as only a couple satoshi's) without having a 3 hour confirm time or a $1 fee due to miners ignorance/selfish profiteering. think of the community and the future, think outside of the box known as your own pocket.

use satoshi dice as a test bed of how transactions will be in the future. not as something to be ignored by overpricing the fee's in the hope satoshi dice will die.

[rme]

Start sending 0.00005 fees now (that is 0.00696 USD).
If too many people start doing this miners will start accepting this fee as a standar.

[mai77]

I actually sent you a tip, but it was eaten by the fee 

[ThomasV]

The default fee in Electrum was reduced recently.
It is now 0.0002 btc/kilobyte
Note that the user may also set it manually.

[mai77]

that's the ADDITIONAL fee

[ThomasV]

that's the ADDITIONAL fee

what do you mean?