Topic: How much in fees do you have to pay on blockchain? (Read 677 times)

If the blockchain gets faster it won't achieve what you think it will. Right now the rule of thumb is to wait 6 confirmations before accepting a transaction as complete. The reason for this is that 6 confirmations are so difficult, and take so long to produce, that the effort and luck required to hack a transaction after 6 confirmations is practically unachievable. If difficulty, and therefore confirmation times, were reduced by half, for example - which can easily be done because it's just a toggle in the Bitcoin software - all that would achieve is that we'd have to wait 12 confirmations for the same level security as the previous 6 confirmations. At the same time, the overall security of the network would be reduced because the amount of wasted hashing power on orphaned blocks would increase. A true reduction in confirmation time, while still maintaining the same level of security, can only come from serious innovations, such as making better use of wasted hashing power, or using different/additional proof-of-trust schemes, etc.

Keep in mind that waiting for confirmations is optional, and technically the network is instant. If you were receiving payment from a fully trusted party that isn't trying to rip you off (like a friend or something), you can just wait 1 confirmation to see that the transaction has gone through, or even just that the network has received the transaction (few seconds).

There's a proposal to up the block size maximum from 250K to a few megabytes. That can be done easily, and would prevent blockchain jams during periods of unusually heavy trading.  There's a more complex proposal to give it a lot more capacity, which requires major changes to the protocol. 

The rate at which blocks are produced is fundamental to Bitcoin's economy, so that won't change, and confirmation times won't improve.  (Litecoin has faster block generation for that reason).

I know this is off topic, but will the blockchain ever get faster?

It depends on the current Bitcoin transaction volume. Right now, things are slow, and even no-fee transactions seem to be going through. A few weeks ago, there was a busy period, and it took a fee of about 0.001 BTC to get a transaction through. The block chain only has a capacity of about 7 transactions per second on average.

thank you, so what would the transaction fee be to send 5 Bitcoins each per wallet? still 0.0005 ? or 0.0001? will it only take 1 hour with this fee? and is it possible that I may never see these bitcoins in my paperwallet if it doesn't confirm or is it pretty much a for sure thing??

Yes, it could be. The fee is determined by many factors like the size of the transaction (in kb), how many inputs the transaction has, how old they are etc. A smaller transaction made up of a million satoshis will have a higher fee than a larger transaction made up of of 1 input, for example. The other thing is that all fees are technically optional. If you didn't mind waiting days to confirm an ugly transaction, you can avoid paying a fee.


If your transaction is part of an orphaned block and no other block, it gets resubmitted to the transaction pool. That is unlikely as miners generally include all transactions.


No. A wallet is nothing more than a collection of passwords that can unlock coins on the public chain. When people send you coins, all they are doing is adding coins to the block chain that only you can unlock. There is nothing "filling up" or running out of space.

Is the fee the same if you send 28 bitcoins like you were sending 1 bitcoin to a paperwallet address? and is it guaranteed to be sent to that address or is it possible it may screw up and become a messed up block? I've seen orphaned blocks on blockchain, what does that mean? If I was to get a orphaned block would it still fix it and send it to a paperwallet adress anyway??  And is there a limit of how many bitcoins you can send per wallet?