Monetary policy

[Vladimir]

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[stakhanov]

I think one of the main problems is information. At this moment there is pretty much no way to tell how long your transaction will take depending on the fee you attach to it.

Maybe a statistical service would be useful. A website (or something integrated into the client?) with info such as "Over the last 24 hours, free transactions took an average of 54min to process. Transactions with at least .05 btc in fees took 12min." would probably be useful.

[caveden]

This is not "monetary policy", maybe "transaction fee policy"...

Anyways, we pay much more to miners in the form of inflation already. Transaction fees are not that significant.

[ribuck]

This is Luke-Jr's Eligius pool isn't it? This pool "will only include transactions in its blocks if the sender pays a fee of at least 0.00004096 BTC per 512 bytes".

I approve of Luke's fee. It's small enough to encourage experimenting with micropayments. It's small enough not to matter for big payments. And non-standard transactions are accepted, which allows experimentation with interesting stuff. And Luke's pool is small enough that people who want free transactions can still get them.

[barbarousrelic]

At this point it's in every miner's interest to require the smallest possible transaction fee. They gain nothing by processing no-fee transactions, and they lose money by requiring a higher fee than anyone is paying (besides zero transaction fee payments.)

This will only change when there are more transactions than will fit on a block, which is a long way in the future.

[marcus_of_augustus]

Are there any plans to display the transaction priority for a send in the official client?

It would at least be some analogue information for the senders about how long their transaction might take .... beyond the dreaded "pay-up" pop-up.

[2_Thumbs_Up]

At this point it's in every miner's interest to require the smallest possible transaction fee. They gain nothing by processing no-fee transactions, and they lose money by requiring a higher fee than anyone is paying (besides zero transaction fee payments.)

They gain by making bitcoin more attractive which makes it more valuable. I'm sure that fee-free transactions increases the price more than it costs to send a few extra bytes of data.

[SgtSpike]

Here's a couple of things I don't quite understand about fees...

I can set fees from my bitcoin client's wallet.

I cannot set fees from deepbit.net, virwox, mtgox, etc.

Are transactions from those sites always fee-free?  Or do those sites always pay a fee?  In my mind, if a fee is suddenly required to send a transaction, and it renders a bunch of websites completely unusable because they are not paying a fee, that's a problem.  We would need a plan in place to deal with such circumstances before making a change like this.

Also, what would happen to free transactions that are out there when/if such a chance is made?  Are they just forever stuck in limbo?  Is the BTC from the transaction eventually returned to the sender if it cannot find a block to place itself in?