selective miner?

[lucasjkr]

I just registered so I could ask a question about the recent increase in transaction fee, but I'm not allowed to ask in that forum, apparently!

Anyways - there's a big broohaha about Gavin raising the default minimum transaction fee - my question is can I set up a miner to only accept transactions for which the fee offered is less than the default? Say, the network asks for 0.0001 BTC, can I set up a miner that will do transaction for 0.000075? How would transactions find their way to me? And would my mined transactions find their way back into the blockchain?

Seems silly that one person (or group of people) should dictate for everyone what they're willing to do - I'd be more than happy to mine the transactions that fall under the price range that 99% of the miners are asking for, if there's a way to accomplish that?

Any thoughts, advise or guidance will be appreciated.

[BTCoder]

I just registered so I could ask a question about the recent increase in transaction fee, but I'm not allowed to ask in that forum, apparently!

Anyways - there's a big broohaha about Gavin raising the default minimum transaction fee - my question is can I set up a miner to only accept transactions for which the fee offered is less than the default? Say, the network asks for 0.0001 BTC, can I set up a miner that will do transaction for 0.000075? How would transactions find their way to me? And would my mined transactions find their way back into the blockchain?

Seems silly that one person (or group of people) should dictate for everyone what they're willing to do - I'd be more than happy to mine the transactions that fall under the price range that 99% of the miners are asking for, if there's a way to accomplish that?

Any thoughts, advise or guidance will be appreciated.

I really dont get what your trying to ask here.

[lucasjkr]

How would a miner or group of miners who decided that they're willing to mine transactions for less than the default fee for the network go about doing so? My wallet (bitcoin.qt) refuses to send any coins without paying a transaction fee - i assume that fee is the default fee for the network; if nodes are willing to mine/verify transactions for less than that fee, how could people direct their transactions to those nodes?

[OnkelPaul]

A client program can create transactions with less or no fees, and of course your miner can decide to accept transactions with zero fees as well.
However, the probability that your miner gets to mine a block is pretty slim, unless you're controlling the mining for a decently-sized pool.

Onkel Paul

[lucasjkr]

Sorry if I'm being redundant here, but I'm still trying to wrap my head around the whole thing.

My client (bitcoin-qt for Windows) refuses to send a transaction unless I agree to pay the fee as well (like, if I try to send my entire balance to a new wallet, I'm informed once the fee is added in, I don't have enough BTC for the transaction. How would I send the transaction with no fee (or simply a smaller fee than what is requested), in that a miner will accept it?

And how, as either a miner or a pool, could I specify that I will accept transactions with less than the minimum prescribed fee attached? Can a BTC client be programmed to send its transactions to a specific pool for processing?

[OnkelPaul]

My client (bitcoin-qt for Windows) refuses to send a transaction unless I agree to pay the fee as well (like, if I try to send my entire balance to a new wallet, I'm informed once the fee is added in, I don't have enough BTC for the transaction. How would I send the transaction with no fee (or simply a smaller fee than what is requested), in that a miner will accept it?

There are variants of the bitcoin-qt client which allow you to send without fee. I don't know exactly how you get and install them, whether you need to compile them yourself or just donwload a binary.
If your goal is to move your balance into a new wallet you might just export your keys from the old one and import into the new one. However, if you feel your old wallet could have been compromised (keys stolen) then transferring the balance is a good idea anyway.

And how, as either a miner or a pool, could I specify that I will accept transactions with less than the minimum prescribed fee attached? Can a BTC client be programmed to send its transactions to a specific pool for processing?

No, all miners see all transactions and try to find a valid hash concurrently. With pools, the "miner" that decides what to put in a block is the pool operator (or rather his software), the pool participants only perform the grunt work of searching for valid hashes, they can't decide and even don't know what goes into a block.
A miner can decide to apply different rules regarding the transactions it will put into a block (for example, it could favor SD transactions or completely ignore them) but this choice only has an effect on the blockchain when this miner happens to find a hash for its block before any other miner finds a hash for the blocks they are working on.

Onkel Paul

[BitshireHashaway]

It seems like he is only trying to mine transactions where the transaction fee is above the fee to withdraw the coins so that he can get some coins from mining based on the transaction fee.

[lucasjkr]

Yes, mining for the transaction fee rather than the block reward. As the block rewards diminish with time, that's all that people will be left mining for. If you're mining for the transaction fees rather than the reward, would you get the fee as you hashed out each transaction? Or would it wait until a block reward was issued? So that's one incentive, the other is to introduce competition on the side of transaction processing. It seems we point out the fee that Mastercard or Visa charges and say "bitcoin's cheaper", but rather than just being cheaper, why can't there be competition on that front?

And if i ran a mining pool, how would people direct their transactions to me for processing if they didn't care to pay the default transaction fee imposed by the network? And would my hashed transactions then get added to the chain?

I think BitshireHathaway is coming close to understanding the question, sorry if i'm not being clear... The issue isn't that i want to move my wallet, just using that as an example - the real question centers on the transaction fee imposed by the network and how it could be lowered if people were willing to do the work for less than the default fee.

[OnkelPaul]

It's very simple: The client can not influence which miner gets to mine its transaction. It just creates the transaction (possibly adding a fee), signs it, and sends it to the bitcoin network.
Then miners decide when to include a transaction into a block.
The client can make the transaction more attractive by including a fee under the assumption that miners will select transactions based on this - however, this is not a fixed rule, and miners can do what they want (egoistic miners could for example avoid all the hassle with transactions and mine empty blocks for the block reward only).
As block rewards go down, transaction fees are an incentive for miners to keep mining and to include transactions into their blocks, because without transactions there are no transaction fees...
And miners can only hash full blocks, not single transactions, so the transactions fees are only available to the lucky one who finds a valid hash.

Onkel Paul