Transaction Fees in the Deflated Economy

[InterArmaEnimSil]

I saw a post from Satoshi in another thread informing us that "Typically over 25,000BTC" had to change hands in a single transaction to warrant transaction fees.

So, will no fees, ever, be charged in a deflated economy?  If the average transaction is .01BTC, or if only 10,000BTC exist in the economy, will no fees ever occur?

[lachesis]

That number is based on the average payment. Specifically, anything over 500 times the size of the average payment will incur a roughly 0.02% fee.

[theymos]

It's based on data size. The first 60 kilobytes are free, and it's (around?) 0.01 BTC per kilobyte after that. Data size is increased when sending the transaction requires that you draw Bitcoins from many different sources.

In the image below (from someone on IRC), 0.01 BTC was sent back and forth until their balance was made mostly of these "cents". Then, when they tried to send the entire balance, 1/8th of their transaction was required as a fee because combining all of these transactions took up so much data.



Transaction fees are at line 525 in main.h.

[InterArmaEnimSil]

Thanks for the clarification - far better way of handling it than I originally assumed.

[FreeMoney]

It's based on data size. The first 60 kilobytes are free, and it's (around?) 0.01 BTC per kilobyte after that. Data size is increased when sending the transaction requires that you draw Bitcoins from many different sources.

In the image below (from someone on IRC), 0.01 BTC was sent back and forth until their balance was made mostly of these "cents". Then, when they tried to send the entire balance, 1/8th of their transaction was required as a fee because combining all of these transactions took up so much data.



Transaction fees are at line 525 in main.h.

Wait is that money poison for all time or does it get reduced somehow?

[InterArmaEnimSil]

Wait is that money poison for all time or does it get reduced somehow?

If I understand the thread correctly, it all depends on which coins the client chooses to send, and whether the transmission of these coins requires the addition of more than 6 (or was it 60) kb of data.  So, no, after being transmitted, all the "bitCents" are in a bundle again, and can be transmitted without charge.  Could be wrong here, though.

Here's a thought - to Satoshi, or one of the other high-order devs:

Does the client choose which of your cash to send to as to minimize transaction fees for the transaction at hand?  It really should.

[Bitcoiner]

Wait is that money poison for all time or does it get reduced somehow?

If I understand the thread correctly, it all depends on which coins the client chooses to send, and whether the transmission of these coins requires the addition of more than 6 (or was it 60) kb of data.  So, no, after being transmitted, all the "bitCents" are in a bundle again, and can be transmitted without charge.  Could be wrong here, though.

Here's a thought - to Satoshi, or one of the other high-order devs:

Does the client choose which of your cash to send to as to minimize transaction fees for the transaction at hand?  It really should.

I didn't see a cancel button there.

Couldn't a client just send a burst of small transactions in order to avoid the transaction fee? If/when 0.01 BTCs become valuable, then the charge might also be something to adjust.

[theymos]

I didn't see a cancel button there.

Couldn't a client just send a burst of small transactions in order to avoid the transaction fee? If/when 0.01 BTCs become valuable, then the charge might also be something to adjust.

There's no cancel button because the person doesn't have enough funds to pay the transaction fee.

When there are already 80 kilobytes of transactions in a block, further transactions get only 3 kilobytes of free transactions. But I don't think the current implementation actually accounts for this when sending, so transactions over 3KB would get rejected and would have to wait for the next block. In any case, the total size of all transactions is capped at either 100KB or 200KB (not sure which), and any transactions beyond that will have to wait for the next block.

It's pretty harmless to adjust transaction fee stuff, which is probably why the terms are not too well-defined right now.

I am not too familiar with the source code (just did a bit of browsing), so I could be wrong about this stuff.

[FreeMoney]

I'm fairly concerned about this. I really don't understand though. Can't transactions get arbitrarily badly backed up if there is a limit to the size of the transactions file? 113k so 13k carries over, 122 in the next time period plus the old 13 is 135 so 135 carries over etc. Isn't it a huge problem once we start averaging hundreds of thousands of trades per block?

[theymos]

In the future you could pay an additional voluntary fee for your transactions to get priority, but this isn't implemented now (in either generating or sending, I think). Also, the max block size isn't a "hard limit", just an arbitrary number that will be changed in the future.

[dillema018]

Yes