Transaction fees too much?

[Kazimir]

Don't you think it is a little too much to have .0001 BTC per transaction?

Who knows if the people receiving those transaction fees are still even around these days? So those transaction fees essentially go away into oblivion, never to be seen again.....

What do you think?

It's not 0.0001 BTC per tx, it's 0.0001 BTC (or 10,000 satoshis) per 1,000 bytes. The larger the tx data, the higher the fee. The data size of a tx is not related to it's input or output amount. A 0.03 BTC tx can be much larger than a 500 BTC tx.

Anyway, I agree. I think for mass acceptance of Bitcoin, it's important to keep the 'almost free transactions' advantage, and 0.00001 BTC (that's 1000 satoshis) per KB data would be a better choice!

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[PrintCoins]

At $1000 a bitcoin (yeah just rounding of simplicity) that is $0.10 per kb of data, which does seem pretty high.

For example, the average transaction fee in the most recent block as of this:
http://blockchain.info/block-index/447052/000000000000000297670c7da6af4c6b66d3f0bc34796480e253f6c95c571243

was 0.000188 BTC in fees or $0.19 per transaction.

If you do a $1 transaction, you will be spending nearly 20% on fees. Goodbye micro-transactions.

That is not very competitive against paypal and other payment systems. I know this isn't exactly the goal of the project, but it would make sense for it to be only a few dollar cents per transaction so that digital sales services can sell things like songs, digital assets, and other low cost things without racking up huge fees.

As it is, only things valued at over $10 per transaction would be sensible (this would be a about a 2% transaction fee at that price point).

[DeathAndTaxes]

Version 0.9 will have some improvements to fee computation.  The current client "rounds up" the tx size to next full KB so fees are in increments of the min fee amount or other larger amount set by user (i.e. 0.1 mBTC, 0.2mBTC, 0.3 mBTC etc).  However miners prioritize tx by actual fee / actual size.  So a person with 400 byte tx would pay 0.1 mBTC but this works out to 0.25 mBTC per KB which is likely much larger than necessary for timely inclusion in a block.  

This mismatch will be corrected in v0.9.  Most tx are less than 1KB.  The average tx is around 2 inputs and 2 output and ~400 bytes.  So 0.1 mBTC per KB on 400 bytes would be 0.04 mBTC.  Even without a reduction in fee rules the actual fee paid on this tx would be reduced by 60%.

[deepceleron]

Isn't it because they found the block chain the transaction fees goes to them regardless? For the new coins generated right now, it goes to the current miners. For the old coins circulating from way back when, the transaction fees goes to those old miners. Right? So essentially it can get sent to an unused address?

I hereby demote you the rank of Coin Private E-1 for this post.