Transfer Fee? does it go up and down?

[sidupac]

I'm a little confused about the transfer fee.
Would the transfer fee be less if more people were mining with better equipment?
and if more people start using bitcoin would the fee go up because more processing is required?

Does the transfer fee change at all?
Does the minimum amount you can send for free change?

sorry many questions.

[BlockChainLottery]

This is how it's calculated for now in the Bitcoin client. They try to make it dynamic in the next versions.

In general transaction fees should go down if more people started to use Bitcoin, because income of more users would increase faster than cost of processing I think.
I don't know for sure what happens if more miners enter the game. Maybe fees go up, because if they find block less and less often, they only include the transactions with the highest fees. Don't know if this is treated in an other thread yet.

[sidupac]

Interesting.. thank you very much!
I'll keep reading through, please let me know if has links to other answers.

[odolvlobo]

It is hard to tell what is going to happen to transaction fees. The fee basically pays for space in a block.

If Bitcoin transaction volume increases to the point where blocks are full, miners will try to maximize the fees  and may no longer add 0-fee or large low-fee transactions to a block.

If the blocks never fill up, then miners will continue to process all transactions like they do now because it doesn't cost them any extra and it promotes Bitcoin.

[Sonny]

Does the transfer fee change at all?
Does the minimum amount you can send for free change?

Yes, we had a few changes on tx fee in the past.
Yes, in the past, free high priority tx can be created, with tx size up to 10000 bytes.
It is now down to 1000 bytes starting from bitcoin-qt 0.8.6.

[BlockChainLottery]

Fees explained.