confused about transaction fees

[pepperoni]

I just started up with bitcoin a couple weeks ago, bought 0.2 bitcoin when it was at ~$200, would have gotten more if i had the money to spare, very poor atm. As bitcoin becomes more popular and the price goes up, will the transaction fee go down? .001 is potentially a lot of money, especially if bitcoin really takes off.

[DannyHamilton]

I just started up with bitcoin a couple weeks ago, bought 0.2 bitcoin when it was at ~$200, would have gotten more if i had the money to spare, very poor atm. As bitcoin becomes more popular and the price goes up, will the transaction fee go down?

Yes.  It has already been reduced a few times.  Although there is potential for it to go back up again after that depending on what is done about the blocksize limit.

.001 is potentially a lot of money, especially if bitcoin really takes off.

0.001?  Why are you paying 0.001?  That's 10 times as much as necessary.  The typical fee right now is 0.0001 BTC per kilobyte.

[pepperoni]

I dont know. I'm using multibit, and I guess I can change the transaction fee manually? I didnt know I could do that.

[pepperoni]

but anyway, if bitcoins end up being $100,000 each, would the transaction fees be scaled down to .00lots-of-0s1?

also, i somehow ended up with two .wallet files, both seem to be the same when i open them. I think that means i can delete one safely?

[DeathAndTaxes]

Yes.

There is no required fee for high priority txs.  If you want you can pay nothing, of course no miner is forced to accept your tx either. 

For low priority tx (small tx amount, low coinage, small outputs) many clients enforce a "min mandatory fee" to prevent denial of service type attacks.  The fee is currently 0.1mBTC per KB. It has been lowered three or four times in the past and likely will be lowered in the future.   Historically this has been an amount equivalent less than a US cent up to a few US cents.

[BookLover]

also, i somehow ended up with two .wallet files, both seem to be the same when i open them. I think that means i can delete one safely?

Theatrically yes, but If I was in your case I save one to a flash drive then periodically back up the wallet you are using. (don't overwrite old backups, a bitcoin wallet is very small so you might as well keep all your old backups in case something goes wrong)

[fildza]

How you are charge 0.001 ? The highest I get charged are 0.0005 when using input.io before

[DannyHamilton]

i somehow ended up with two .wallet files, both seem to be the same when i open them. I think that means i can delete one safely?

Is this one of the files you are talking about?

https://multibit.org/en/help/v0.5/help_fileDescriptions.html

Rolling backups. In your rolling backup directory you will see one (or sometimes more) file with the name 'saving-YYYYMMDDHHMMSS.wallet'. This is the rolling wallet backup file. Every time the wallet writes to disk, the existing wallet is kept as a backup. The main purpose of this file is to recover from any sudden loss of power that prevents a clean wallet save.

[junshong]

I just started up with bitcoin a couple weeks ago, bought 0.2 bitcoin when it was at ~$200, would have gotten more if i had the money to spare, very poor atm. As bitcoin becomes more popular and the price goes up, will the transaction fee go down? .001 is potentially a lot of money, especially if bitcoin really takes off.

You can choose to send with no fees but it might never confirm or confirm slowly. The minimum is 0.0001 if you want to give the fees.