Questions about transaction fees?

[k]

was reading about transaction fees at https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction_fee and am still wondering a few things about them.

I see something about

If the blocksize (size of all transactions currently waiting to be included in a block) is less than 27 kB, transactions are free.

No idea what the current blocksize is? How do you find this out?

have any transaction fees been paid/collected to date? or have all the transactions so far been fee free?
if so what sort of amount has been paid in btc for transaction fees?

any predictions for when transactions fees will start to be regularly be paid?

Am I correct in thinking that the miner who sloves the block gets the 50BTC + all the transaction fees for that block?
Any predictions when the typical transaction fee would be ~1,5,10,..BTC per block.

any good posts on this topic.


thanks

[PLATO]

Here's the most recent block, note the 50 + 0.09 of fees that were paid to the miner: http://blockexplorer.com/block/0000000000001f04dc63a2c8965e8ed033aa4f51a3d57905814f883a6f2e5590

You can voluntarily attach tx fees in your client. Miners have no obligation to include tx in their blocks, although basically everyone include all tx at this point in time.

At some point (after generation rewards are small) miners will refuse to include tx that have zero fees attached. I couldn't guess at what point this will come.

I don't think we would ever see fees of 10btc/block, because the value of bitcoin will probably be way higher in ten years than it is today. Maybe miners would require higher fees for bigger tx?

tl,dr: we'll have to wait and see

[theymos]

The current blocksize varies by miner.

[k]

thanks Plato.

that makes the tx fee business much clearer.
The blockexplorer site is very interesting. I see it gives info on the number of tx in the block. Are there any charts on this? i.e average# of tx/block over time - I know some blocks take longer than others to be solved so will on average contain more tx's.

At all the blocks I looked at the # of tx's seemed fairly low (low tens). Wonder what block had the largest # of tx's to date?

if bitcoin starts really taking off then the # of tx's /block could really start to increase and then the block size would get bigger and tx fees will play a more important role.

I could easily imagine 10btc/block in the future if there were millions of tx's per block. If bitcoin is to fulfill it's potential then it will have to be doing more than ~10 transactions every block (i.e. ~10 mins). wonder how many tx's visa or mastercard are doing every 10mins? just thinking out loud (or at least to the sound of typing keys).

just remembered this http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/29/jack-dorsey-shares-some-big-square-numbers-341688-readers-shipped-137m-total-flow/ - 23630 tx's in less than a day for square (a new startup doing credit card readers that you connect to your iphone). hmmm, that's only ~16/10mins. still a long way to go. some recent blocks http://blockexplorer.com/b/121120 have had 13 tx's. sorry just rambling here.

lots to think about

[theymos]

At all the blocks I looked at the # of tx's seemed fairly low (low tens). Wonder what block had the largest # of tx's to date?

This one:
http://blockexplorer.com/block/0000000000044fe138de69e80045e9ed77b2d992fbf07d76a81532e293e9e695

Here's some info on scalability:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability

[k]

thanks theymos.

Actually I've just been checking out your site (I'm right that you run the http://blockexplorer.com/ site?). Very cool.

the stats and tools are great http://blockexplorer.com/q

to answer one of my own questions the average number of tx/block is currently 20.017 from http://blockexplorer.com/q/avgtxnumber