Topic: Did Blockchain Charge Me For This Transaction? (Read 358 times)

Nope... Unlike normal fiat "banking"... when you "deposit" coins into a bitcoin address, they don't all merge together to form one balance and you can then just send a specific amount and that is all that is taken from your account.

Instead, what happens with bitcoin is that they stay as the amount that got put in... for example, if you receive 1 BTC, 0.1 BTC and 0.01 BTC from 3 different transactions, what you actually have is 3 "chunks" in your account that add up to 1.11 BTC... Think of it like chunks of gold in a little vault.

When you want to send coins to someone else, you have to hand over enough complete chunks to make up the value you're trying to send, and the miners break off the required amount and give you back the rest as "change"...

So say you now wanted to send 0.05 BTC to someone... your wallet would start looking through your vault at the chunks available... and would see that 1.0 is probably too big (but could be used if we don't find anything else), 0.01 is too small, 0.1 BTC is just big enough... so you hand over your 0.1 BTC chunk... and tell the miners, you guys get to keep 0.0001 BTC for helping out (miner's fee aka network fee)... the miners take your 0.1 chunk, break it up, send 0.05 to the other person, keep 0.0001 for themselves... and give 0.0499 BTC back to you as "change".

You now have a 1.0 BTC chunk, a 0.01 BTC chunk and the new 0.0499 BTC chunk in your vault...

So, in your situation, the 0.0022977 that coinbase got is like the 0.0499 in my example... it is the leftovers of the chunk they sent (0.05) after the recipient (you, 0.049013) and the miners (0.00075723) got paid their shares.

I hope that isn't too confusing...  

Thank you all for the excellent answers.

I was not aware of the different exchange rates. The reason I am using Bitcoin is to find out more about it, so I just learned a lot.

HCP said:

    "...0.00022977 going to what is probably a change address of coinbase..." is this some kind of fee?

Suggest you stop using fiat/$ amounts... and look at the actual amount of BTC transacted... the BTC/USD rate is constantly moving and just confuses everything... Also, different services use different conversion rates... which confuses things even more... ie 1 BTC on coinbase is probably shown as a different $ amount compare to 1 BTC on blockchain info

Your transaction: https://blockchain.info/tx/51c090f1081687bf0b6ce8fbda28ecbaf61f88b70eb24eee4e368bd4c74e1d02

Shows that 0.05 BTC was sent out (presumably from coinbase)... with 0.049013 btc going to your Blockchain address... and 0.00022977 going to what is probably a change address of coinbase...

The miners fee was 0.00075723 BTC...

What I am guessing has happened is that you said... send "$100"... coinbase went ok... $100 = 0.049013 btc... it needed to add the fee to that... so 0.00075723... it uses a 0.05 output, deducts 0.04976853 from your account, sends you 0.049013, gives 0.00075723 to the miners... and sends 0.00022922 back to itself...

Blockchain gets 0.049013 into your account... and because a. the rate has moved and/or 2. they use a different conversion rate... they display it as only $98...

Everything is a giant mess and everyone is confused...   

Please do not refer to Bitcoin amounts by their USD value. The exchange rate constantly fluctuates so it won't remain the same value for a long time. That is probably what happened here. The exchange rate at one time (and with one rate) was a certain value, and when you checked the transaction later, the exchange rate had changed. Furthermore, Coinbase and blockchain.info use different exchange rates, so what is $100 according to Coinbase will probably be different from $100 according to blockchain.info

Blockchain.info cannot charge you or take any money away from you unless they control the private keys which sent the transaction, and they don't since Coinbase controls them.

I checked the transaction at 2017-05-21 18:35:11.

When did you checked your balance on blockchain? Also price wasn't so changeable today to feel such loss and usually there aren't hiden fees from coinbase when you are sending btc. Also on transaction which you wrote here, it shows that balance is 98.29$. Well, I have used blockchain wallet many times and I have never got such issue, better to contact coinbase about that, I highly doubt there is something wrong with blockchain.

Are you saying that the market moved enough during the transaction to cause me to get less?

it because the bitcoin network now has plenty of unconfirmed transaction
so if you want your transaction got confirmation fast you need to add a high fee

and maybe you set the fee to get fast confirmation

Sent $100 from Coinbase to Blockchain. On the send end, I was charged $1.54 miner's fee. So, a total of 101.54 was deducted from the account. Transactions were quickly verified (within 5 minutes)

ON the receive end, I got $97.83 in my Blockchain account, so $2.17 was missing.

I repeated the transaction a few minutes later, this time $2.57 was missing

One of the transaction ID's was 51c090f1081687bf0b6ce8fbda28ecbaf61f88b70eb24eee4e368bd4c74e1d02

(I am only using the web versions of these applications)

What happened to the $2.17 and the $2.57?