I'm not sure if this has been proposed before, but I think it would be a good idea to make transactions with unusually high transaction fees attached to them non-standard.

Unless I am missing some legitimate use cases for very high transaction fees, they are almost always the result of a mistake or malware (like in the case of hardware wallets that do not verify the transaction chain but do verify the value of the output - those are vulnerable to a denial of service type of attack by lying about the value of the inputs and making them pay a lot of money in fees).

Are there any legitimate reasons for someone to pay 1 BTC (or even 0.1 BTC at today's exchange rates) for a regular transaction? 0.1 BTC would mean a transaction size of 1MB (at 0.0001/kB).

Initially I thought the OP suggestion was bad, but now I think it is good with your comment. This is exactly the reason for us to make it non-standard. Since bitcoind won't broadcast non-standard transactions, we could avoid it locally by making them non-standard


Agreed. We may have separate non-standard criteria: one for broadcasting, one for relaying, one for mining. Most of the time the rules are the same, but we may prohibit the broadcast of some transactions, such as having >0.1BTC miners fee. The rest of the network would still relay and mine these transactions

Really? I don't notice there is a change but I think this is exactly what I'm proposing

It might be even better to allow users to define the value of insane fee. IMO 1BTC is too high.

Unit testing people!!

Anyway, all-fee transactions have a number of uses that we will want to explore in future. Making them non-standard would significantly hurt our ability to innovate. People who are working directly with money at the API level need testing to avoid mistakes like this.