Are zero transaction costs possible?

[Philip Ruby]

What do you think, is it possible to have zero transaction costs for bitcoin/altcoin. At the moment there are many fees and are they justified and impossible to get around or is it possible to reduce or even remove them in the future?

[tobacco123]

Many app/wallet software calculate the "suitable" fee automatically. For expert, they usually generate the transaction themselves with the fee that they are willing to pay. I am not sure about 0 fee, but very low fee is possible.

You can try coinb.in to generate your transaction with the fee you want to include. Just sign and broadcast the raw transaction after that.

[NeuroticFish]

What do you think, is it possible to have zero transaction costs for bitcoin/altcoin. At the moment there are many fees and are they justified and impossible to get around or is it possible to reduce or even remove them in the future?

The usual transaction fee for Bitcoin nowadays is 1 satoshi/byte. That makes most transactions have a few cents fee. Unfortunately most online wallets and exchanges charge big fees, but that's their bad policy.
0 fee is possible, but there is a good chance the miners will not confirm your transaction. They don't really like to work for free. Hardware is expensive and electricity has to be paid for too.

[1Referee]

I have sent a couple of 0 fee Bitcoin transactions this year and they were confirmed within 10 blocks, but that was without heavy network congestion and the amounts were fairly large. I'm sure that if it was an amount of like 0.005BTC or so that it would sit there doing nothing for plenty of more hours.

In the end it's not worth the hassle. Seriously, wasting hours just to save yourself $0.01 in fees is ridiculous and shouldn't be an option, unless it is more for testing purposes wich was the case for me when I sent transactions without any fees.

Network usage increases the fees significantly because there is no infinite block space. All fees are justified as long as you are willing to pay them.

[BrewMaster]

transactions will always cost something no matter what. it may not be in form of fee but it will be a cost.
but if fees are your concerns then for bitcoin and those altcoins that  copied bitcoin NO it is not possible because of the design of these coins. fee is there to prevent spam attacks from going on for eternity.
but it is possible in other designs  that are not copying bitcoin. for instance NANO and i think IOTA also have 0 fees.

I have sent a couple of 0 fee Bitcoin transactions this year and they were confirmed within 10 blocks,

would you mind sharing the TX ID of these transactions?
i have been trying to do it but i have been failing to get it to even propagate. the nodes reject it so it doesn't even reach the miners!

[YuginKadoya]

I really think that hardly can not happen transaction fees are rewards for miners, They call it the miner fee and it is absolutely needed until the last block of bitcoin has mined, However, transactions still need to be validated and stored on blocks in the blockchain so miners will only benefit from transaction fees and This could essentially be the lifeblood of miners in the next century, once there are no more BTC tokens to be unlocked. This is laid out in Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin whitepaper, But if you really want a fee free transaction there are wallets that are not issuing fees if the transaction was made with the same wallet transfer, Or maybe there are fees but in a way of a different approach but it is highly noticeable, And you will need to encourage everyone you know to only use the same wallet you are using.

[Philip Ruby]

So basically the question has two layers I guess. First is for example fee of Bitcoin transaction and the second one is all the technology related to a wallet. And yes, I understand totally that there are real costs in this world and the money must come from somewhere. But there are some cases where you move your tokens and end up paying an enormous amount of money. That's why I raised the question too.

[Philip Ruby]

I really think that hardly can not happen transaction fees are rewards for miners, They call it the miner fee and it is absolutely needed until the last block of bitcoin has mined, However, transactions still need to be validated and stored on blocks in the blockchain so miners will only benefit from transaction fees and This could essentially be the lifeblood of miners in the next century, once there are no more BTC tokens to be unlocked. This is laid out in Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin whitepaper, But if you really want a fee free transaction there are wallets that are not issuing fees if the transaction was made with the same wallet transfer but you will need to encourage everyone you know to only use the same wallet you are using.

Yes, that's true.

[nicolaz.zhu]

For the cost of bitcoin and altcoin transactions will not be removed, there may be a reduction in transaction taxes, but the more expensive the price of the coin will increase the tax

[xindoa]

i do not think transatcion cost zero will be possible. we need miners for transations to be confirmed. and they will need to be payed as the cost of running a miner is pretty high.

[1Referee]

would you mind sharing the TX ID of these transactions?
i have been trying to do it but i have been failing to get it to even propagate. the nodes reject it so it doesn't even reach the miners!

I prefer to keep them hidden since these were transactions from and to my cold wallets.

Yes, there are plenty of nodes that by default ignore 0 fee transactions. What client are you using and have you tried to create a raw transaction and use an external service that will broadcast your transaction for you? If you do, carefully inspect if all parameters are set correctly, because this is how people quite often end up paying insane fees.

[BillCoin]

For the users ,Yes.
For an example see EOS, it offers a platform where the service provides are also those who pays for the fees, which means that the users have nothing to worry about fees.
Not only that, some Proof of Stack coins won't even require you to pay any fees  for the miners, as the miners are just random people who owns stacks in the network and are being chosen randomly, It makes the life much better because there are no fees to be paid, but on the other hand, it might make the currency that is being used in the network to suffer from an deeper inflation.

[Silenox]

In Bitcoin a zero rate is almost impossible, but a low rate is feasible. The miners have costs to make the transactions, and if there are no gains they will hardly keep the machines mining, which will decrease the hash power and consequently the security of the blockchain. The proof of work has this characteristic, and despite the costs, they are the ones that guarantee the security of the data contained in the blockchain.

There are some currencies that have zero rate propositions in transactions, such as Nano.

[insculpt]

nano has zero fees, or so they claim. There are many coins out there that charge minimal fees

[Philip Ruby]

I see yes, that mining as well is a big question because you do need a lot of computer power etc. Thanks for the answers guys. I will also investigate this nano, seems interesting too.

[Skieleton]

What do you think, is it possible to have zero transaction costs for bitcoin/altcoin. At the moment there are many fees and are they justified and impossible to get around or is it possible to reduce or even remove them in the future?

The usual transaction fee for Bitcoin nowadays is 1 satoshi/byte. That makes most transactions have a few cents fee. Unfortunately most online wallets and exchanges charge big fees, but that's their bad policy.
0 fee is possible, but there is a good chance the miners will not confirm your transaction. They don't really like to work for free. Hardware is expensive and electricity has to be paid for too.

Nothing is for free and no one will give anything away for free. Here it will not be different. In a good situation, the fees are ridiculously high ...

[bitfocus]

zero is almost impossible but transaction fees are too low these days and I guess it will become just a few cents in future.

[BrewMaster]

would you mind sharing the TX ID of these transactions?
i have been trying to do it but i have been failing to get it to even propagate. the nodes reject it so it doesn't even reach the miners!

I prefer to keep them hidden since these were transactions from and to my cold wallets.

Yes, there are plenty of nodes that by default ignore 0 fee transactions. What client are you using and have you tried to create a raw transaction and use an external service that will broadcast your transaction for you? If you do, carefully inspect if all parameters are set correctly, because this is how people quite often end up paying insane fees.

thanks for the reply.
what i do is that i use my Electrum wallet to sign these transactions with  0 fee and then use different bitcoin nodes (not Electrum but directly the bitcoin core nodes that i can see using their IP addresses) to push my tx. i haven't tried it recently so maybe things have changed a bit, i need to recheck again later.

[Malaya]

I guess it can be reduced but not a zero transaction fee. Zero fees are only possible to a same wallet transfer and a same coin transfer. Fees also serves as payment for those who run nodes and confirm transaction. If there is zero fee then what will these people get from working hard.

[DaveWave]

It is very unlikely that coins will have transactions costs as those are rewards for the miners and stakes. You can use coins that have low transaction costs like DGB and many more.