Topic: Are transaction fees expected to rise over time? - page 2. (Read 1795 times)

Please be a bit careful about who you speak for.  I've 'always' felt that Bitcoin should be 'free' to those who strengthen the system.  Alas, the designer (or post design maintainers) didn't see fit to reward transfer and/or verification nodes so that idea is out the window.

Under Bitcoin's current design I'm happy to pay $10/transaction and that is what I set my local bitcoind to do.  It's a screaming deal compared to doing international wires, and it has proven both vastly more reliable and vastly more quick.

Hopefully sidechains (or better yet, treechains) will come along to take the penny-ante bullshit load of the main system and allow it to remain lightweight (and thus semi-distributed and reliable) while simultaneously the actual multibit-class users will be able to pay fair support fees (pennies) rather than groveling for subsidies on the main chain and whining when they don't get them.

In the long run, when block rewards approach ( and eventually reach) 0, fees will have to be sufficient to support mining energy costs.  However that should not be an issue because at that point bitcoin will be either huge or extinct.  Even with 1 billion $ in daily transactions, that would mean 1 million in fees with a 0.1% fee.

10k satoshis too is sufficient for "high priority" status on blockchain.info

It is just that 20k satoshi is the default fee and not many people change it.

Not really.
Multitransactions still allow spammers , but they usually need a database of addresses , I'd guess they find them on the forums 

I think it will rise more, it is already pretty high, electrum and other clients are charging 20k satoshis for every transaction, no matter how much you're sending.

Where do you get $0.13 from?  The average tx is <1KB and the min fee to relay for v0.8+ is 0.1 mBTC which is ~$0.06.  That is falling to 0.01 mBTC in v0.9+ which is more like $0.006.


Fees are even higher for the unbanked.  mPesa which is probably the most successful private payment network is Africa is about 5x the cost of Bitcoin to transaction $10l.

FTFY. The answer is yes, incidentally.

Imagine that the US Mint printed lots of extra cash and gave it to VISA in return for visa charging no fees.
So if the transaction fees replace block rewards, the difference may be more about marketing than economics (though who actually pays for the network changes too).

Transaction fees will have to go up. But honestly, current transaction fees are very high already, much higher than credit cards--but they are hidden in the block rewards and shared via inflation.

I think a fraction of a cent is probably enough to deter spammers from sending too much dust.

As far as the blockchain goes, it's already quite big and at this point most people are going to be better served using Electrum for a number of reasons. Of course the community should still try to have as many full nodes as they can going, but the average user is not going to be running a full node.

Fees are useful to prevent spam on the blockchain. Without fees, or with very low fees, blockchain would be too big for most people. 

At this point though will most miners even notice, or care? The transaction fees are minimal compared to the block reward. I could see it being ignored even if transaction volume was dropping.

The problem is that miners might not even know what they are potentially missing. For example if miners agreed to cap fees at one penny and that helped spread adoption worldwide(and thus raising the price of bitcoin) they might actually make more money. But if miners are only focused on the short term optimization of profits via supply and demand with transaction fees then they might miss a long term opportunity to grow bitcoin.

Now is the time to forgo minor profits for potential growth. The block reward is still very large and nickeling and diming people in the early stages of bitcoin can't possibly have more benefit than maximising the chance for people around the world to adopt bitcoin. And the only way it's going to happen is if miners decide as a group that it's in their best interest to charge less fees.

Lowering transaction fees doesn't automatically guarantee that bitcoin is going to be adopted by groups that are resistant to using bitcoin because of the standard transaction fee. But we do know that for certain people and for certain sizes of transactions the fees are a barrier and they are a problem that can be solved. Removing the barrier is just one step in increasing the probability that more people can use bitcoin.

Of course people can try to send their transactions with any fee they want but in the current market very few miners will bother processing those transactions which makes bitcoin not worth using for those attempting to circumvent fees.

many people do not factor in the number of transactions per second which is a key variable in this discussion, today bitcoin has it capped to 7 but in future that limit could be removed and if there are 5000 tps like visa and mastercard, then even very little transaction fees can support the miners...

As I said before , miners will reduce fees when they notice that lesser people are offering those fees.
The propogation of a transaction should be treated like any service , whose price is decided by demand.

If there are too high fees , with nobody willing to accept the fees , they will reduce over time as miners realise that they would earn more with more transactions.

25c fees would be a disaster really. Bitcoin will go on and people will still invest and use it for large purchases when it's convenient but it will seriously lose a lot of competitive edge.

That's some wild speculation. Even so, transaction fees will have to be compared to something. Whether that's gold, rice, or litecoin, bitcoin will always have a value. And a transaction fee will also have a corresponding value. The USD part isn't important here at all.


The fee can be anything miners want it to be, but the question is what will it be and when. And who is going to take steps to ensure that it doesn't price out 2 billion or more people.

Transaction fees are utilmately decided by the pools and miners. They can choose to accept or reject transactions with lower than standard fees. We have little say in this, but we can try to force them to accept lowers fees if we all use a lower fee. If bitcoin price continue to rise, we can expect them to accept 0.00001 as standard fee.

i think fees should be even lower
transaction speed is aproblem that needs to be solved

What do you mean by inflation ?

The block reward continuously halves to prevent inflation. The fees are in place to ensure that the incentive to maintain the network remains even after the block reward is negligible.

I've wondered the same thing about the fees. To send very small amounts it's not very practical. Maybe something will have to be done about this.