I would like to be able to send .33 bitcoins without a fee. How do I do this?

[joshuaMachine]

Is there a node I can connect to that will do this or something like that?

[1714005086]

1714005086

[1714005086]

1714005086

[1714005086]

1714005086

[bitlotto]

.33 should be free to send. Just make sure you turn off transaction fees in Bitcoin.
If you are sending something that requires a fee normally use:
-addnode=173.242.112.53
Who knows how long it will take though to get accepted.

[joshuaMachine]

.33 should be free to send. Just make sure you turn off transaction fees in Bitcoin.
If you are sending something that requires a fee normally use:
-addnode=173.242.112.53
Who knows how long it will take though to get accepted.

the gui client is telling me my .33 bitcoin is "over the size limit" and that I need to send it with a fee. I can choose no, but then it doesn't send the coins.

[theymos]

There's no way to override that, though it probably won't happen if you wait a few days for your coins to age.

[bitlotto]

There's no way to override that, though it probably won't happen if you wait a few days for your coins to age.

How long does it take for coins to "age"? Is it consistently two days or does it vary?

[joshuaMachine]

I have coins that are 3 days old... does that help? Is there a way to use the CLI to override this behavior and go ahead and send them (even if it takes a long time to confirm)?

[theymos]

How long does it take for coins to "age"? Is it consistently two days or does it vary?

It varies. The priority needs to be above a certain level, and priority increases with coin age.

I have coins that are 3 days old... does that help? Is there a way to use the CLI to override this behavior and go ahead and send them (even if it takes a long time to confirm)?

There isn't any way to override it. You could go back to version 0.3.19, which doesn't require fees for low-priority transactions.

[Jaime Frontero]

you could send 1.33 BTC, and request a 1 BTC refund.

bonus points if you're a member of the Somali royal family, trying to get help with salvaging your family's wealth...   

[malditonuke]

you could send 1.33 BTC, and request a 1 BTC refund.

bonus points if you're a member of the Somali royal family, trying to get help with salvaging your family's wealth...   

ha!

[Gavin Andresen]

If your 0.33 bitcoins came from one or two recent payments to you, then waiting a day or three to let the inputs "mature" will let you send them without a fee.  The transaction priority fee rules are designed to discourage people from sending lots of small bitcoin transactions in a short time.

If your 0.33 bitcoins came from 20 or 30 penny-sized payments to you, then you'll have to go to a lot of work to send them without a fee, because a 20- or 30-input transaction will be too big to qualify to be free.  The transaction size fee rules are designed to discourage people from wasting everybody's disk and network bandwidth by sending big transactions.

If you did receive lots of tiny payments, you can try to bundle them up in chunks-- you might be able to send three payments of 0.10 BTC without a fee (because each of them would be smaller than the "too big to be free" size).

But you should ask yourself:  is it really worth your time?  0.01 BTC is less than 5 US cents.  If it takes you more than 20 seconds to send 2 or 3 payments to avoid the 0.01BTC fee, then you're valuing your time at less than US minimum wage.

[ribuck]

... The transaction size fee rules are designed to discourage people from wasting everybody's disk and network bandwidth by sending big transactions ... you might be able to send three payments of 0.10 BTC without a fee

Clearly the fee system is suboptimal if one can reduce fees by workarounds that increase system overhead.

[Gavin Andresen]

Clearly the fee system is suboptimal if one can reduce fees by workarounds that increase system overhead.

I learned long ago that it is much better to create a sub-optimal system that is simple and robust than to try to create a perfectly optimal system.

Pretty darn good, with the right incentives in place to drive the long-term desired behavior, is good enough for me right now.  I think "we" have been pretty good at responding fairly quickly to problems as they appear.   I'm keeping a close eye on the free-transaction backlog, but I think tcatm's recent changes to http://bitcoincharts.com/bitcoin/ , showing transaction priority, and the recent change to the bitcoin client, so the default fee rules are the same for miners, relaying across the network, and the client, are working nicely.

[randomguy7]

Btw, what are the changes in the latest version regarding the transaction fee policies? I noticed that I can send transactions with version .20.1 without adding a fee which require a fee to send with version .21 (but they take very long to be processed, I assume most miners updated to the latest version).

[Gavin Andresen]

The rules that the GUI (and bitcoind sends) follows to figure out if you should pay a fee are now the same as the rules in the block generation code.  The rules themselves didn't change.