Topic: How to give btc users no transaction fees. - page 5. (Read 1239 times)

I like seeing it that way, but there are tons of things that prevent me from doing it. There's so much speculation behind all this and the point of a currency is to finally behave stably. But, it won't. It turns out, that nowadays, a currency has to be approved from the government to operate properly; we aren't living with bargaining nor with gold coins' usage. These things are long gone and the way Bitcoin works misses out that fact.

I believe we're into an experiment; some say that it's the new gold. I personally find one characteristic that makes it not look like that either. It's been owned by civilians, but gold from the governments and that's probably why its price is being so manipulated. Simply put, it's something new.

Just think what would happen if the whole world used a deflationary currency during the pandemic...

If one satoshi ever worths a lot or simply more than the dust amount, we can agree upon a hard fork where we'll extend it to twelve subunits.

Well of course it wouldn't be rejected. New rules would be in place that allowed a transaction that had a fee to be replaced by a transaction with zero-fee. Similar to RBF but in the other direction.


Well yes there is, it costs money to get into mining. For example, you can't use an office computer to mine things. It needs expensive GPU which may not last a long time. Then you have to buy another one. Also, you have to be able to find an exchange to unload your "useless altcoin" as you referred to it. And that may not be so easy and you have to trust shady exchanges maybe to do that.


But I would think it would imply people using smaller and smaller fractions of bitcoins in transactions. There's a limit to how far down that goes though, one satoshi. If one satoshi ever got to be worth alot then what do you do then?

I appreciate all that. What I'm saying is that I don't care enough to either check the exchange rate or not buy the product or service. If I'm going to use bitcoin as a currency (which I am), then I'm going to use it as a currency, and that means spending it when I need to spend it without thinking "Maybe if I wait till tomorrow I'll get a better rate on this product/service". Just like with DCA for holding, if you just spend it when you want to spend it then it all averages out over time. Sure, sometimes I'll pay a bit more and sometimes I'll pay a bit less, but that's a price (pun intended ) I'm willing to pay for using bitcoin as a currency.

Only if there is an item being sold for USD, and I want to sell the necessary amount of BTC to have enough USD to buy that item, which I never do. Anything I can buy with BTC, I buy with BTC. Anything I can't, I buy with USD. I couldn't tell you the last time I actually just sold some BTC for USD in a straight exchange.

If the merchant wants USD and not BTC, then the product that costs $10 will be sold for 24,000 sats. If the price suddenly (or not) decreases by 10% then your purchasing power also does too. The merchant won't ask you for 24,000 sats, but for 26,400. Without noticing it, you'd need 2,400 sats more; not because of the demanding; simply because the merchant doesn't ask for a fixed amount of Bitcoins, but measures them in USD instead. So, essentially, what the merchant does with the Bitcoins is a little much of your concern.

I have dealt with someone who was only accepting one fixed price (310,000 sats) for his product. He's allowed to leave it the same forever. The problem is that if Bitcoin becomes more valuable than before, so does his product.

You can't really deny the irony. As long as the currency you use for living isn't Bitcoin, you're doomed to calculate the in-between exchange rate. Fees included.

But I don't see it change every single moment. I see a price displayed when I place my order on a website or when I take my goods to the cashier to be rung up. I don't ask for their conversion rate to USD to see if I'm getting a good deal in USD, and very rarely do I look up the going rate on a web browser myself (usually only if I think something seems expensive in terms of BTC, I'll check if there has been a big price swing since the last time I looked at the price, which could have been weeks ago). Why, when everything else about the transaction is measured in BTC, does it make sense to single out the fee for consideration in USD, especially when the fee is almost always a couple of hundred sats, or in the case of a Lightning payment, completely negligible.

As I said, it is none of my business what the merchant does with the BTC once he has received them.

That's the point I'm making. I generally don't think of the price of the product in USD.

Only if you select a fiat option in the preferences. If you don't select a fiat, then no fiat rate shows.

But, why does this amount of BTC changes every single moment? Haven't you wondered that the marketing value of BTC in terms of USD affects your purchase since the merchant will prefer not to keep them in the block chain, but rather convert them to USD?

That may be just you; when I make a purchase I want to make sure the fee that I'll pay won't be high in terms of USD, because I'm generally paying everything in terms of USD. There's no reason to think in terms of USD for the price of the products, but skip the fee.

Ironically, these non-custodial wallets show the equivalent of your fiat you're spending for the mining fee.

The merchant can price things in a fluctuating amount of BTC, pegged to a certain amount of USD or other fiat, if they choose. Of course. No problems there. But I have no knowledge of what they are doing with the BTC I send them, nor do I care to know. They could immediately convert it to USD, they could hold it forever, they could pay their staff or suppliers with it, they could buy some shitcoin. Their choice, and none of my concern. All I know is there is something I want to buy for x amount of BTC, I will send the merchant x amount of BTC to purchase that item, and I will pay the fees for this transaction in BTC.

Honestly, I do this multiple times a week. Usually the only reason I know that the bitcoin price has swung significantly is because of posts on this forum. I pretty much never check the price in terms of USD before I spend or use BTC, and I never think of the fee I pay in terms of USD.

And the things I cannot buy with bitcoin I buy with USD. And when spending my USD I think in terms of USD, and any credit card fees or other such fees I calculate and consider in USD. Just as when being charged sales tax on an item I'm buying in USD I don't think of the additional charge in BTC, then when buying an item with BTC I'm not going to think of the fee in USD.

If we were all able to pay our bills, our purchases from the local market, our education, our health using Bitcoin, it'd start not having much sense to calculate the exchange rate of 1 BTC in terms of USD, because we'd be enough from our self-controlled and decentralized currency. But, since no state accepts it, then the merchant will have to convert these sats to USD; he's constrained into using Bitcoin.

While this currency is one of the most revolutionary moves of all time, you're still living in a society where you're restricted into following certain rules. I've said this before, but adopting a so “anarchist product” into an orderliness world isn't going to really work.

Except it would be rejected by the network since the mempool already contains a transaction spending those inputs, and RBF cannot be used since the fee on the new transaction would be lower, not higher.

You are still paying for it, just in terms of electricity and hardware degradation rather than in bitcoin. Nothing stopping you from mining some useless altcoin, dumping it for a few hundred sats, and using that to pay your bitcoin fees.

I disagree. If a merchant is selling something for bitcoin, I am paying them in bitcoin, and we are making a transaction between our bitcoin wallets, then why would we be calculating the fees in USD? It makes no sense.

You can. Miners don't want to include transactions that don't have a fee because there is no benefits in for them, other than to have a slower block propagation. There is nothing that can make miners include zero-fees transaction, arbitrarily giving miners Bitcoins in lieu of transaction fees involves significant economics repercussions and definitely would need far more research in that.

Since a reasonable timeframe for a CPU to generate a sufficiently expensive PoW would be in the range of hours, then it would make little sense. Too cheap, and you risk having spammers clog up the network.

This is a very bad analogy. If you pay with your credit card, the payee can repay his bills or any other person of his country (or nation) with the currency you paid him. There's no point to count the fees in yen, because you are completely unconcerned about that currency if you're not living in China where everyone accepts it. This isn't true with Bitcoin, that's why there are no fixed prices in any store that accepts it. Only a fool would do that.

Just like when you translate a price of a product in terms of USD whether you accept Bitcoin or not, you do it for the mining fees too. In the example above, a person who wants to move the equivalent of $10,000 in Bitcoin pays more as the price arises, because the equivalent in BTC decreases but the fee remains the same.

I took the example where both transactions weight the same. Then I doubled the price; the equivalent in fees was doubled too.

I've lost bitcoin to a crashed encrypted computer, which I had to overwrite because of a deadline.
So that's probably gone forever.
But there's no guarantee that a large amount of bitcoin is truly lost though.
It's an assumption -- a completely impossible to prove assumption.

A lower supply isn't necessarily a bad thing on a macroscopic level.
On an individual level, it no doubt sucks -- but there is no way to reverse transactions without introducing all sorts of protocol flaws.
There isn't a macroscopic reason to renew those bitcoin, as it brings value to the bitcoin that already exist as bitcoin is lost.

There are reasons to keep miners incentivized to secure the network. An infinite supply is fine, but miner rewards should always decrease over time to match the lost bitcoin, or miners would eventually outstrip node power and limit that security benefit.
Small transactions don't need the same security, which is what alt coins and the lightning network are good at.

 I see your point but someone that has a "stuck transaction" could always submit a new one with no fee I suppose. And get it picked up quick.

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Well I think there's a delicate balance that has to be achieved. You see, the thing to keep in mind is that as people lose their private keys through whatever events that happen in their lives, the bitcoin supply actually goes down. Thus, having a tail emission does make sense from the perspective of renewing those lost bitcoins. But I don't really think a large tail emission would be ideal.

[moderator's note: consecutive posts merged]

What do you mean by users pay more or less than they should? How do you determine what users should pay? Currently, the market determines what users should pay.


There is nothing in Bitcoin that requires miners to receive higher fees in order to cover the decreasing subsidy. The effect of a smaller block reward is lower security, so you must show that security is too low before claiming that fees are too low.


It has become apparent to most people now that Bitcoin cannot be used for everything that everyone wants to use it for. If it cannot be used for transferring small amounts (and this is debatable), then that is just the way it is.

Easy enough to do. Fees are generally defined in the code as "per kilobyte" rather than "per byte", so the minimum relay fee is currently set at 1000 sats/kilobyte, which obviously works out to the 1 sat/byte which we are all familiar with. Easy enough, then, to simply change that to 500 or 100 or whatever sats/kilobyte which converts to 0.5 or 0.1 sats/byte.

In Bitcoin Core version 0.11.1, the minimum fee was temporarily increased to 5000 sats/kilobyte or 5 sats/byte to protect against transaction flooding.

I think you are missing the point.

It is possible to pay higher/lower fees based on the user hurry.

If I really need to get a confirmation in the next block, it is important for me to pay for a high priority transaction.
On the other hand, if I can wait for a week, it is also important to have an option to send for lower fees.

You are paying for what you get. And as pooya87 pointed out, miners do not need transactions fees to make money ( at least not for now). Block subsidy (6.25) is more than enough to pay for their expenses.


I agree with this. I have pointed out many times that fiat currencies also have a high volatility. USD and EUR are not so volatile as other currencies. For example, BRL is very volatile.

Take a look at USD BRL charts over the last 5 years: 63% variation


Since the pandemia started (march 2020) BRL lost 21% value against USD.

This is a very high volatility, and people live here with this volatility. Just as bitcoin users live and make transactions with BTC volatility.

I think that in long term, there might be a possibility to create sub  satoshi/vbyte transactions, as bitcoin prices gets higher...

I see a possible solution that can work with sending temporary private keys to other user that can use and activate that private key.
Something similar is used by Chipmixer and there is one wallet called Mercury that is using this idea for improving privacy on Bitcoin using layer-2 scaling technology based on statechains.
For sending a private key you don't need to pay any fees, but there needs to be some trustless solution to avoid scamming and abuse.
Another way is paying (almost) no fee using Lightning Network for sending Bitcoin.

When you are transacting in bitcoin, there is absolutely no point considering fees in USD or any other currency. If I am paying by credit card, would I consider any additional fees in terms of yen? If I am buying a money order, would I consider the fee I pay in terms of rubles? Of course not; nobody would. So why would it be any different for bitcoin?

Further, even if you do consider fees in terms of USD, then even if the USD value is static then your fee can vary greatly, as you have pointed out. The fees that I pay are affected far more by the type of transaction I am making and when I am making it than by the price of bitcoin in USD. If I use segwit instead of legacy and smartly choose the time to consolidate my inputs, then I can save >99% on fees. Even if the bitcoin price swings by several thousand dollars, then my fee in terms of USD will only change by a few percent.

I guess that the OP understands it like that:

Assuming that the user wants to transfer the equivalent of $10,000 in Bitcoin.

Case where 1 BTC = $10,000.

• User creates a transaction that moves 1 BTC and pays 1000 sats in fees.
• The user has paid the equivalent of $0.01 in fees.

Case where 1 BTC = $20,000.

• User creates a transaction that moves 0.5 BTC and pays 1000 sats in fees.
• The user has paid the equivalent of $0.02 in fees.

It doesn't matter if the mempool is empty or not; if both transactions weight the same and pay the same amount of BTC to the miner, then the user seems to pay more in the equivalent of dollars in fees if the price rises.

PoW works on the concept that it expends some resources while making it trivial for the rest of the network to validate. Adding additional strain to process like this isn't really ideal; we aren't looking to make it more expensive resource wise for validation than required.

I don't see fees as necessarily something that is required by the miner, in the context of coin distribution. You could very well get away with a tail emission and ensuring that block rewards are never really zero. That won't be implemented in Bitcoin. I don't think we need to necessarily make Bitcoin more complicated as it is, having users pay transaction fees is not a bad idea at all. If you were to enforce PoW, then people are going to eventually spend the equivalent as paying a fee and it would probably just be better to pay the fees, for the network and for the users themselves.