wait time for miners attempt to confirm transaction?

[wolverine.ks]

it's my understanding that miners can decide to mine transactions that include an arbitrarily set minimum fee.

if/when the block becomes saturated, will time/fee amount be calculable?

Is it calculable now? I.e. at x transactions /second, then x fee would give y% probability to be included in next blocck.

[phatsphere]

the first realization is that miners are not obligated to include any transaction at all. second, the tradeoff is not only the simple inclusion of the transaction, but more importantly the used size in bytes of an transaction.
what miners maximize is the payoff of all included transactions subject to the size constraint. this is an np hard knapsack problem that can be solved approximately quite well (read: "fast")

so, your calculation also needs to take into account the transactions size and the sizes and fees of all others to get any meaningful probabilities. also, i don't think that all miners work anywhere near optimality and timing is also a critical factor.

[wolverine.ks]

so not all transactions are the same size? are you talking amount of btc or the size in kb? how varied are they? what is the size, of in kb, based on?

[grue]

so not all transactions are the same size? are you talking amount of btc or the size in kb? how varied are they? what is the size, of in kb, based on?

transaction size are based on how much "inputs" and "outputs" they contain. in general, if your wallet's balance is scattered across many addresses, the resulting transaction will be larger.

[acoindr]

it's my understanding that miners can decide to mine transactions that include an arbitrarily set minimum fee.

if/when the block becomes saturated, will time/fee amount be calculable?

Is it calculable now? I.e. at x transactions /second, then x fee would give y% probability to be included in next blocck.

There was a good thread posted here about calling transaction fees bids as that's more accurate. How can you call something a fee when you can set it at any value or disregard it altogether?

To understand how mining and the block chain works think of the lottery. There is simply no way to know who will win the next draw. However, the winner of a particular draw/block gets certain privileges including a reward of funds/coins and the ability to dictate which transactions are included in the block they win.

If they are the winner, then they can include transactions they want, whether the fee is large, small, or not there at all.

By including a fee (or bid if you like) you increase the chance the next block found will acknowledge your transaction, since presumably most people mining blocks are motivated by profits. The higher the bid or fee, the higher the probability your transaction gets included.

Right now, because Bitcoin is still fairly small and it doesn't really cost miners anything extra, many or most miners will include transactions regardless of attached fees, as the goodwill helps Bitcoin overall. The only drawback or limitation to this is if someone is looking to bloat the block chain with valueless spam by sending very small coin amounts to themselves or other addresses over and over since it costs them practically nothing to do this. To guard against this very small coin amounts do require a fee for miners to acknowledge it, or it may not be included into the block chain for a very long time, perhaps many days or weeks. There was a thread explaining the ratio of transaction amount to fee size for likelihood of being included in a block around here explained by DeathAndTaxes who is good with details like that if you're interested.

[Icon]

Well in the past I asked seeing I was a miner if I did not solve any blocks would I still receive small amount of BTC for hosting part of the block chain/bandwidth. I was told no. Also where does the (fee/bid) go to when you pay the transaction fee? Does it go to one address seeing block chain is a distributed network.

[acoindr]

Well in the past I asked seeing I was a miner if I did not solve any blocks would I still receive small amount of BTC for hosting part of the block chain/bandwidth. I was told no. Also where does the (fee/bid) go to when you pay the transaction fee? Does it go to one address seeing block chain is a distributed network.

Well, you're sort of mixing things.

It's possible to receive some funding reward (usually in the form of whatever coin you're mining) if you participate in a mining pool without actually solving a block yourself.

It's the same concept as lottery pools for state lotteries. You as an individual can contribute your resources (dollars) to a pooled pot of tickets. If your lottery pool wins you receive a share of the winnings, though you technically don't own a winning ticket yourself.

As far as Bitcoin itself goes if you don't solve any blocks you don't get anything, no fees, no block reward; just as with a state lottery if you don't give them a winning ticket you get nothing.

Any transaction fee which accompanies a transaction goes to the miner that solves the block which includes the transaction.