Bitcoin Transaction Charges

[royalecraig]

What are they, I thought bitcoin transactions were free, if this is because individuals are contributing processing power to the network, I'd prefer to offer that free than have charges.
If there must be charges, maybe there must I don't know, but if there must, why not 0.0000001BTC on every transaction, over time this might amount to significant amounts and could fund full time developers and maintenence.
Who gets these charges anyway, not that it bothers me that much at the moment with no BTCs to trade with.

[1715328936]

1715328936

[bji]

What are they, I thought bitcoin transactions were free, if this is because individuals are contributing processing power to the network, I'd prefer to offer that free than have charges.
If there must be charges, maybe there must I don't know, but if there must, why not 0.0000001BTC on every transaction, over time this might amount to significant amounts and could fund full time developers and maintenence.
Who gets these charges anyway, not that it bothers me that much at the moment with no BTCs to trade with.

Every question you have asked is easily answered by reading either the bitcoin whitepaper, or the bitcoin wiki, or any of numerous posts on these forums.  I suggest you google for answers to your questions.

[luxgladius]

Fees are based on the size of the transaction in bytes. They can be avoided if you use funding from transactions that are very mature in the chain, or if a transaction is very large in bitcoins, preferably both. More detail than that is difficult because the client and the protocol somewhat diverge on what an appropriate fee is. The protocol will accept any correct block into the network, but most miners won't accept your transaction if the funding is too new or the transaction is too small for inclusion in a block.

The fees are generally a way to keep down spam transactions, so it's not easy to flood the network by issuing 1 billion transactions with 10 Bitcoins.

The fees go to the miner who solves the block.

[JoelKatz]

IMO, the client needs to be modified to tell the user what the results of the transaction are going to be. The current method of silently doing something the user can't easily understand is, IMO, unacceptable.