Bitcoin-qt network fee

[soy]

I maintain two copies of the blockchain, two running instances of bitcoin-qt.  The other day I sent 10.00 btc to Coinbase and was informed by bitcoin-qt that there would be a .0012 transaction free.  Fine.  Today I went to send roughly 9 btc and was told the fee was over 0.06 btc?  I don't understand the increase.

[nelruk]

Very odd your case; my friend, last week sent 20 BTC and the fee was 0.001. Of course, using Bitcoin-Qt

[NeuroticFish]

Such things can happen, afaik, if you have a lot of dust in the wallet.
Did you play a lot lately with faucets?!

[soy]

No.  Did Coinbase increase the fee for accepting bitcoins?  Dust.  I see.  These bitcoins were mostly mined in 2013 & 2014 and paid out at ~.1 btc while the lower charged send was mined in 2015 and paid out at .3btc from another wallet.  But still, I sent 10btc from *this* wallet to Coinbase on 1/21/15 and was charged a .0012 network fee.   

[Blazr]

The fee doesn't depend on the amount of money you are sending or who you are sending it to, it mostly depends on the age of the Bitcoins and the actual data size of the transaction (in kilobytes). If you are sending Bitcoins from lots of different addresses (well technically different outputs) in one transaction then the fees will be higher, which is likely what is happening in your case.
 
For example, here is a transaction where $150 million (194,993 BTC) was moved and the transaction fee was 0 BTC:

https://blockchain.info/tx/1c12443203a48f42cdf7b1acee5b4b1c1fedc144cb909a3bf5edbffafb0cd204

But in any case 0.06BTC is seriously high and something is seriously wrong there, do you use lots of Bitcoin faucets or something? if you want you could post one of the transaction ID's here and I can take a look and give you a better idea whats going on.

What version of Bitcoin-qt are you using?

[soy]

Transaction ID: 4780e1c9e79371c4342bbb65554a30f939bef58f16eb89addcd20e8c19f90757-000

Bitcoin-QT 4.6.2

[chaosknight]

i think tx fees are not something that are decided by receivers
i have done many transactions without any tx fees, i just send the money normally and whenever required qt wallet ask me to add a fees for the transaction but in most cases its 0 or 0.0001BTC

[Blazr]

Transaction ID: 4780e1c9e79371c4342bbb65554a30f939bef58f16eb89addcd20e8c19f90757-000

Bitcoin-QT 4.6.2

Here is the transaction:
https://blockchain.info/tx/4780e1c9e79371c4342bbb65554a30f939bef58f16eb89addcd20e8c19f90757?show_adv=true

On the left you can see there are a LOT of outputs being spent, which is probably why you're being asked to pay such a high fee, however the transaction size is only 10KB. Technically you could probably get away with only paying 0.001BTC for this (0.0001BTC/KB).

Go to Settings > Options > Wallet and check that Pay transaction fee is 0.00010000 BTC.

The version you gave me was the wrong thing. Go to help > about bitcoin core (not About Qt) and your version will look like this: v0.9.4.0

[soy]

v0.8.6-beta

This blockchain had been a bear to keep current.  The Vaio laptop was low on memory and kept crashing until I found that I hadn't been mounting my swap file.  Since mounting my swap file there have been no more crashes.

I'll take your advice about changing my fee entry on my Bitcoin-QT.  It takes work to keep these running and for what I ask, looking at the 0.0616 fee.

So, I'm running two Bitcoin-QT blockchains and have never seen any transaction fee credited for running these.  How do I get credit for maintaining these?

Oh, I see:
"While running Bitcoin-qt it is true you are contributing to the Bitcoin network, but only in the sense that other peers can now download the blockchain using your bandwidth. There are no transaction fees sent to anyone that is not mining. Mining is the process which helps the network transact and thus sending balances from one account to another. " from http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/21668/can-i-earn-transaction-fees-by-running-as-a-full-node-verifying-transactions-b

I suppose I felt burned after a stupid mistake.  Deciding to sell 10btc that I had been holding on to for so long while watching it lose value over the years, and knowing that Coinbase Exchange is allowing no fee buying and selling for a month, I made the mistake of thinking that there'd be a no fee transaction on Coinbase proper and ended up paying a 10% fee for selling on Coinbase instead of Coinbase Exchange.  Stupid mistake.

[Blazr]

v0.8.6-beta

Thats a pretty old version. You should update to the latest version. This might be partly the reason you were charged such a high fee.

This blockchain had been a bear to keep current.  The Vaio laptop was low on memory and kept crashing until I found that I hadn't been mounting my swap file.  Since mounting my swap file there have been no more crashes.

Yeah Bitcoin Core is pretty resource heavy and will only continue to get worse as the Blockchain grows. Although newer versions run a bit smoother compared to the version you are using.

You should consider using an SPV wallet instead such as Electrum, it only needs a couple MB space to run and uses almost no CPU/RAM, though you won't be contributing to the network.

So, I'm running two Bitcoin-QT blockchains and have never seen any transaction fee credited for running these.  How do I get credit for maintaining these?

Only miners get those fees, and the fees only make up a tiny portion of their income. People just running nodes do not get any incentive, although they really should.

[fullhouse]

you can set your fees in optin .0.0001 fees is enough for all trade

so you don't need to pay so much fee ..0.06 wow..

[ranochigo]

Transaction with loads of inputs/outputs would incur a lot of fees, due to the size of the transaction. You can use coin control feature to exclude dust/low inputs to reduce the size of the transaction. To have a free transaction, the size must be maximum 999bytes to qualify. Also, the transaction fees have been reduced in V0.9. Upgrade the client would be one of the choices.