Topic: Do you want to pay the fee? - page 5. (Read 6894 times)

EDIT;  I WAS WRONG WHEN I POSTED THIS AND OVERSTATED FEES BY APPROXIMATELY A FACTOR OF TEN.  SEE PAGE 4 OF THIS TOPIC FOR A DETAILED CORRECTION.  --CRYDDIT.


Actually I think they'll be considerably higher than that considering what I anticipate the value of Bitcoin to be at that time. Mining fees will need to be reduced considerably for Bitcoin processing to remain "cheaper than alternatives" when Bitcoin goes north of US$10K, or the per-coin transaction fee will be 80 cents.  Even for smallish purchases there are usually at least 3-4 txid's involved, so is a "usual" transaction fee of $2.40 or $3.20 per transaction entirely reasonable for processing each and every one of your daily purchases?  Bearing in mind that today credit card companies are doing it for a nickel or so plus 1% of the transaction amount?

So save that dust; if they do reduce transaction fees in the future, it may become spendable again.

(EDIT; I WAS WRONG WHEN I POSTED THIS AND OVERSTATED FEES BY MORE THAN A FACTOR OF TEN.  I AM DEEPLY SORRY FOR THE TROUBLE THEREBY CAUSED TO EVERYONE. -- CRYDDIT)


FWIW, fee being about a dollar means about 12 "coins" are being used.

If you're only trying to spend a dollar, this means you must be paying in dimes and nickels.  

So you're looking at your wallet and it says you have X available;  but because it's in nickels and dimes you'll burn half of that in tx fees when you try to spend it. So you probably only have about 1/2 X that can actually be used.  The rest will be blown on fees.  Aaaand, that kinda sucks.

If you were paying with a ten-dollar bill, your tx fees would be about 7 cents.

The thing that most don't get is that this doesn't depend on how much money you're trying to transfer, as it does in a sane world; it depends on how many individual coins you use.  So spending a ten dollar bill *and* a penny will cost twice the "sales tax" of spending just the ten dollar bill.  

I'll have to look at the code, but it may be even worse than that.  If this size coin is also the only thing you have that you can use to pay your tx fees, you'll be making your transaction twice as large when you add coins to cover tx fees; so the client may be wrong here and your $1 transfer will actually be a nonstandard tx until you sink $2 into fees.

I think that bafflement on this point is one of the problems with the interface.  The wallet should show the actual *spendable* amount (the amount that will be left after paying the tx fees to spend it) rather than some imaginary amount you won't be able to actually use.  It would banish a few illusions about how much you're actually being paid by sites that pay out in these tiny tiny coins.

Translate all amounts above into Bitcoin of course.  Instead of "dollar" I mean "about .001 Bitcoin" and instead of "nickels and dimes" I mean "txouts worth .00008 Bitcoin or thereabouts."  "pennies" or increments of .000001 bitcoin truly *are* dust; they cannot normally be spent without incurring more in transaction fees than they are worth in money.

when all 21m coins have been mined, transaction fees will supposedly be valuable enough to continue the act of mining and adding compute power to the network. transaction fees are desirable.

Running a p2pool node at a low hash rate (currently below 10 GH/s) also causes this problem. I have about $2000 worth of BTC dust crumbs sitting in a p2pool mining account and the client is asking for about $400 in fees to transfer them out. I think I know how to reduce this by transferring larger chunks into the address and letting them sit for a few months and become candidates for higher priority transactions.

This.  This is why loitering around "free bitcoin dust" sites is a waste of time and a bad idea.  I remember when I finally had enough 'dust' to do something with, the transaction fee was brutal. But I paid it, because, lesson learned.

I have a small project I'm working on where people will send .0005 or so btc to an address and they don't care about confirmations, it can take a week really doesn't mater, is there a way for them to send that amount without fees using the QT client?

Yes, but they shouldn't grow so much per transaction, they should grow per block (-> more transaction in a mined block).
We want Bitcoin to be an effective payment system, so fees should be low.

Fees are supposed to be the incentive to keep miners at work even after the last block has been mined, so they should actually grow.
No fee = no bitcoin.

i think Armory can remove the fee but most miners will rightfully refuse to proses your transaction.

You are wrong about the 1$ fee, it is not even close on that!

At MTgox current price the transaction fee is $0.081265

I think people should be happy to support the network and the miners.
Maybe the fee will come down in time, as more transactions are made and BTC value increases.

Paying the fees will make your transaction be confirmed faster. Of course you can choose not to pay a fee, but it's odd how your client is forcing you to do so.

You have to do some trick but I would recommend you not to, it will take really long to send the coins...

of course i want to pay that. you dont understand the system 

If the outputs can be of high priority individually and have no problems to confirm without a fee then you don't have to send them individually anyway.
Also one high priority output can label a transaction as high priority even if it includes some low priority ones.

This. I only use fees when I need a payment to get through ASAP - i.e., almost never.  That said, I don't deal in dust either.

It's not that high right now, I think like 7 cents, but still I agree it would be great if we could get it lowered somehow.

Well, you could send the outputs individually without fee. It will just take some time.

Yes we could add "Send with no fee and probably won't get confirmed because miners aren't a charity." button if you like?

Try paying the sandwich with a ton of 1c coins and see how amusing they find that.

The option is missing because if it was there a lot of people whould be crying out because their transactions are never confirmed.

0.0001/kB BTC fee * $1000/BTC = $0.10. You can avoid fees that are multipliers of the minimum by not filling your wallet with only trivial dust payments that are more expensive to spend than to discard.