The transaction fee is just ridiculous.

[Light]

You are not forced to pay a TX fee (probably said at least 10x so far in this thread) although removing the TX fee from your TX will generally cause small delays in the confirmation of your transaction.

The delays are not always small - there are various factors (including the settings of the major mining pools) that have implications upon whether you're transaction will actually ever go through. Generally though larger transactions (>1000 bytes) may not pass without a fee.

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[Flashman]

They're not always small if you pay. This one time, at band camp, I sent a tx with full fee, and the network hit a "bad luck" patch, half hour between blocks, and txs got backed up, took 12 hours to confirm. Then another time, sent a small one without fee, and network was in a "good luck" patch with 6 blocks in 25 mins, so got 6 confirms in 25 min.

[awesome31312]

What about those moments when people accidentally omit a few zeros and end up sending transactions with 0.1 BTC worth of fees?

[Flashman]

As a miner... there's no problem with that

[RodeoX]

What about those moments when people accidentally omit a few zeros and end up sending transactions with 0.1 BTC worth of fees?

In that case I'm afraid it's bad news. 
Or if you are the miner who included your block, It's good news. 

[RobertDJ]

What about those moments when people accidentally omit a few zeros and end up sending transactions with 0.1 BTC worth of fees?

This is when the importance of attention to detail is made more clear. Additionally most clients will automatically setup the TX for you including the suggested fee to include in order to have the transaction confirm quickly.

Additionally, I can say that I have, on a few occasions included a .001 TX fee instead of a .0001 TX fee, however I think that a $0.40 fee is still very cost efficient and I have sent enough no TX fee TXs so that my average fee is under .0001 even with these mistakes

[Borisz]

Out of curiosity.
Even when setting the tx fee to 0 in settings (bitcoin core client), when sending a payment I get a similar popup.

Yes - Send transaction and pay fee
Cancel - Cancel transaction

How is it then "optional" to pay the fee? There doesn't seem to be a way around it.

[HeroCat]

Transaction fee is not high. If you make small BTC transfer, then fee is too high. You can try to pay smaller fee, but the question then will be - when transfer will arrive. With standart fee 0.0001 BTC, transfer go instantly.

[DannyHamilton]

Out of curiosity.
Even when setting the tx fee to 0 in settings (bitcoin core client), when sending a payment I get a similar popup.

- snip -

How is it then "optional" to pay the fee? There doesn't seem to be a way around it.

If you send a transaction without a customary fee, then it is very likely that your transaction will take an exceptionally long time to confirm.

The Bitcoin Core wallet is designed to protect unknowledgeable users from this problem.  If you really want to send a transaction without a customary fee with the Bitcoin Core wallet, then you can, but you'll need to use raw transactions.

If you don't want to take the risks associated with using raw transactions, and you want to take the risks associated with sending transactions without their customary fee, then you can use a wallet that doesn't enforce the fee requirements.  It's "optional" because you can "opt" to use a wallet that doesn't force you to include the fee.

[Borisz]

Out of curiosity.
Even when setting the tx fee to 0 in settings (bitcoin core client), when sending a payment I get a similar popup.

- snip -

How is it then "optional" to pay the fee? There doesn't seem to be a way around it.

If you send a transaction without a customary fee, then it is very likely that your transaction will take an exceptionally long time to confirm.

The Bitcoin Core wallet is designed to protect unknowledgeable users from this problem.  If you really want to send a transaction without a customary fee with the Bitcoin Core wallet, then you can, but you'll need to use raw transactions.

If you don't want to take the risks associated with using raw transactions, and you want to take the risks associated with sending transactions without their customary fee, then you can use a wallet that doesn't enforce the fee requirements.  It's "optional" because you can "opt" to use a wallet that doesn't force you to include the fee.

Understood! Thanks for the explanation!

[Dabs]

Mr Borisz,

There is this fork of the bitcoin core client:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=22434.0

2014-10-05 Update:
NFTF - version 0.9.3 released.

It gets updated a few days or a few weeks after a new version of bitcoin core comes out.

It does not completely eliminate tx fees. For that, you can still do the raw transaction thingie.

[bryant.coleman]

Transaction fee is not high. If you make small BTC transfer, then fee is too high. You can try to pay smaller fee, but the question then will be - when transfer will arrive. With standart fee 0.0001 BTC, transfer go instantly.

Actually one of the advantages of Bitcoin was supposed to be the ease of doing Micro-transactions. The transaction fee will make that advantage exist no more. Something needs to be done on this front.

[Dabs]

Bitcoin was never meant for micro transactions.

When have you ever seen a cheque for 4 cents or $0.04? (USD value). When do you ever swipe your credit card for 4 cents? If you go to the actually minimum tx fee of 0.00001 BTC, then today that is less than half a cent, or $0.004.

[Satosh¡ Slot]

We are FORCED to pay a tax upon every transaction, and they say Bitcoin doesn't have any taxes? That's just pure crap. Taxation is unconstitutional theft via armed extortion. In Bitcoin's case, it's unavoidable, and is without the armed extortion (YOU ARE FORCED TO PAY).

Just go ahead and send your transactions with zero fees. Noone is forcing you to include the fee and lots of transactions go through without paying. Also there is no punishment for not including a fee. Sure, you may have to wait longer for confirmations or even resend transactions that never confirm, but you won't go to jail for it.

[awesome31312]

Noone is forcing you to include the fee

Armory is. Said about 1000 times in this thread

[murraypaul]

Noone is forcing you to include the fee

Armory is. Said about 1000 times in this thread

So use a different client, or bug the Armory developers to change it.
You are a complaining about a problem with the software you have chosen to use, not with Bitcoin.

[awesome31312]

Noone is forcing you to include the fee

Armory is. Said about 1000 times in this thread

So use a different client, or bug the Armory developers to change it.
You are a complaining about a problem with the software you have chosen to use, not with Bitcoin.

That is why I said the transaction fee is ridiculous, not "Bitcoin is ridiculous"

[bryant.coleman]

Noone is forcing you to include the fee

Armory is. Said about 1000 times in this thread

Armory is not the only one. Almost every single Bitcoin client is now forcing us to pay the tx fee. I think Blockchain.info is the only exception. But even in Blockchain.info, I had one transaction turned down with BTC0.00005 tx fee.

[teukon]

Out of curiosity.
Even when setting the tx fee to 0 in settings (bitcoin core client), when sending a payment I get a similar popup.

Yes - Send transaction and pay fee
Cancel - Cancel transaction

How is it then "optional" to pay the fee? There doesn't seem to be a way around it.

Did you try the Command-Line options -mintxfee=<amt> and -minrelaytxfee=<amt>?

[Flashman]

My preferred behaviour for a wallet, would be that it asks me every single time what fee I want to pay. Thus if I'm just doing a "wallet maintenance" shuffle and don't care how long it takes, no tx fee, then if I want "same day" service pay regular fee, if I think my TX is super important and want preferential treatment I should find it easy to add fees as I see fit.


One thing that would be good though, is if wallet could report the average fees and number of TX for the last block. Then if you saw fees were high and TX were high, you'd know that network was "busy" and you'd have the option of matching high fees to get priority or being content with waiting it out.


I believe that tx fees should maybe be "marketed"/explained to the user in terms of a familiar thing like postal service, with notional standards of service like "surface letter", "airmail letter", "international express" and "same day" and proportionate TX pricing. Well I'm not saying a no-fee TX should take a "far corner of the world" 3 months like surface letter, just that the scaling of time/cost should be similar.