What do you want to purchase for 0.012 BTC? (That's 6 times 0.002 BTC.) And what if you want to spend 0.1 BTC, or even 1 BTC? Or even transfer your coins to an exchange, for whatever reason. That's when the huge fees come in.
Try sending, let's say, 500 of these recent small amounts you received (you can select them using Coin Control) to one of your own address - you will see the important fee you will have.
(You don't need to complete the transaction, your client will ask you to confirm it when displaying the fee.)
You won't run bankrupt by paying 0.010 BTC or even 0.030 BTC in fees - but I would rather prefer to keep those BTC for myself (especially as it will represent a few days' worth of mining).
Anything which is smaller than, let's say, 0.01 BTC, and in big quantities, is dust. And lots of dust = lots of fees.
If the payments would be once per day, the size of each transaction would be 4 times bigger, there would be 4 times less individual transactions, and it would give you 4 times less fees (much less than that, actually).
Anyhow, I do not see the point of being paid every 6 hours. Is it really that people do not trust the pool owner and think he will run away with coins if they are not distributed straight away, and they would fear too much if he would only distribute once per day?
I guess I should ask my employer to pay me every 2 hours, and not every 2 weeks...
You seem to be jumping all over the place with this. You mentioned up to 75% in fees. The fact is NiceHash payouts can't add up to more than 1% in fees in the worst case scenario, no matter if you collect 0.01, 0.1, or 1.0 BTC.
If you collect 1 BTC in 500 payouts, that's 125 days of mining (again, worst case assuming you hit exactly 0.002 four times a day). Your fees will be very low because input age is a factor too. Have you actually read the webpage you linked to?
http://bitcoinfees.com/I am sorry to contradict you, but you would still have a huge fee for that transaction. Input age is a factor, but divided by the size (in bytes) of the transaction - so your transaction would still have a quite low priority, and would therefore incur fees. That wouldn't change much over time, unless you *only* take older transactions and not take the newest ones.
Furthermore, at 148 bytes per input, 500 inputs would give you 74000 bytes (74 KB !! ), which is quite a large transaction! It might take a while before miners accept to process that transaction, as bitcoin miners are know to choose smaller transactions, therefore faster to incorporate into blocks, as a few milliseconds of delay can mean that another competing miner finds a block before them - and a 25 BTC reward is much more important than a miner's fee of 0.0xx BTC.
(it should eventually go through after a few days, up to a week, though - but don't expect such a large transaction to go through immediately, that's for sure!)
I am certain that the fees coming out from nicehash payments will be will be much higher than 1%. I've had fees of around 3-4% with lots of "small" transactions which actually were 10-20 times bigger than those small transactions here.
You are right, though, that you won't get 75% in fees with payments of 0.002 BTC - it would need to be smaller dust than that. But ridiculously high fees with dust (even up to 90% of the amount that was intended to be spent) have been seen. Here is an example: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1f4t2e/90_transaction_fee_how_can_this_be_avoided/
Amounts of 0.002 BTC _are_ very small amounts. ($0.85 USD at the current rate of $425/BTC.) I cannot understand the usefulness of receiving such small payments - especially when we all know it will increase the fees and will cause us some slight annoyances when spending it. That is way "un-optimal".
If I was to spend another 2-3% in fees, I would rather prefer to give it to the pool operator, for all his good work, instead of spending it on tx fees (which goes to other miners, and do not profit people around here).
