Topic: Optional fees should be optional (Read 1789 times)

I believe you can downgrade to 0.3.20 without any loss.

However, do a backup first. Always do a lot of backups.

I have this problem too.  I only have .07 BTC right now and I can't send it without paying .01 transaction fee? That's a large percentage.

How can I change Bitcoin versions without losing my wallet?

The reason fees currently exist, is not really for rewarding miners. For now, the generation income will probably stay a lot higher than fee income. However, fees are useful for 1) speeding up transactions 2) preventing spam transactions and 3) getting people used to the idea that some fee will be needed in the future, and have the network experiment with it.

Anyway, the default minimum fee (for large or spammy transactions, or subcent outputs) is going to be decreased soon, and probably made more configurable.

Yeah, processing power is plentyfull, I don't even pay for my electricity it is included in the rent and I am pretty sure I will upgrade my CPU and GPU before ware an tare at below 50C on max utilization in mid-summer becomes an issue...

Also we have a server room in this apartment complex where I can stash any shit for free doing anything 24/7 ... anyone wanna donate some hardware?

Fees don't seem to matter now as the block payout is reduced they will but still as I mentioned there could be other ways for the client to force people to add processing power to the network than pay fees. Obviously since I pay nothing for electricity and have a free server room I am somewhat biased to paying in processing power rather then fees...

But there are many other issues I see with fee. Basing it on some formula of network load is not predictable. Entrepreneurs want to be able to predict there expenses. From an entrepreneurial perspective predicable fee schedules like Liberty Reserve and PayPal has are so much more attractive. Though as an entrepreneur that has been cracked down on by PayPal and have to pay then with fucking check for $10 to have my account restored (no bank in my country barley even know what a check is, the issuing fee starts at $30) I would not say there fees are predictable but most of there users don't run into these kind of trouble...

The mining or fee alternative I think would solve some of this for entrepreneurs. That can learn pretty fast what makes the data per transaction high, see if it is something that they will need and they can invest in some hardware if they see they will produce a lot of network load instead of paying massive fees for every transaction they do. The current way mining works even if it did offset transaction fees the knowledge threshold to even joining the simplest pool with a GPU miner is actually pretty high for the average joe.

Then again everyone would need to use the official client or making sure no-fee transactions gets processed by forcing mining on official client users would just create too many free-riders with alternate clients ... really something like this should be have been implemented in the bitcoin network itself. Which I guess is why I see still see this as a extreme risk holding, if someone comes up with a better crypto P2P commodity it all will become worthless...

That is an obvious bug, i have written about it in multiple places.

http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=10702.msg153527#msg153527
http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=10419.msg150844#msg150844
http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=8153.msg150444#msg150444

Just use 0.3.20 like me and it will be fine.


I guess i am lucky too, because all low-prior transactions also send quickly for me (by "quickly" i mean under 2 hours).

I have been testing with very small or payments that join other payments (I think this means they are complicated) back and forth between my wallet and mybitcoin and also have tried a 0.01 payout setting from my pool. Everything seem to clear in a couple of hours. Though everything between me and mybitcoin is probably within the highest and oldest payment with 250 confirmations that I have so maybe they are all taken from that and the confirmations sets the priority? I need to read up on this some day and maybe finish my crypto class and number theory class ... anyway in the mean while I hope I can contribute something where economics and business and marketing strategies are concerned.

But I lost my first wallet with a ton of coin because I didn't understand the Austrian regression theorem of money properly and though this stuff would be worthless so I am probably no good there either .... you never created money, you created a scarce virtual good ... dammit!
 
But my point is that the way fees are enforced by the latest client just aren't competitive at all. Not even to PayPal to be honest, it is not that difficult to mask you identity there either as long as your volumes stay low and certainly not to Liberty Reserve. Also if BitCoin can't be used for micropayments we are going nowhere. Trust in an anonymous network doesn't start with hundreds of dollars...

You were lucky then, most fee-less transactions that are low priority are very, very slow.

It took about an hour to get confirmation on the transaction the newest client would not let me send without fees.

This is nothing compared to bank transfers and the fee requested would be extreme compared to other instant payment like Liberty Reserve for instance...

I read that more processing power on the network makes it less vulnerable for attacks. So I can see a reason to enforce fees there. I would like to suggest that rather then addressing this with mandatory fees in the client the client could give people an option to either start paying fees or to mine a little when they produce a lot of transaction data.
Though I am not sure how much people that will never solve any blocks actually contribute, but if every bit of cpu power actually do contribute it should be possible to avoid fees being enforced by the client by mining. Like a hashhours achived quota that could be checked before asking for fees.

Ofc this would probably be alot of coding and there would need to be way better options for mining in the client like a setting to set the mining process to LOW/IDLE priority and maybe a max hash ratio for people who don't want to run there systems too hot.

Also if anyone want to answer I would very much like to know what would happen to a 0.00 fee transaction in a system that is constantly overloaded by transactions that are paid for? Will it go away if it never gets processed so you can send the bc again with a fee or what?

ok so I downloaded the 0.3.20.2 version and can now send any amount just fine without being nagged and blocked about fees.

Anyhow I think some discussion on why the fees work as they do in the latest client would be beneficial.

There aren't any alternate clients that are as simple (well mybitcoin but it doesn't have a recieving account address book which is terrible) and I don't think that having the best working client force fee payments at this stage will be at all beneficial to the expansion of BitCoin at this stage...

EDIT: thanks for the reply that this seems it is going to the be rectified in future versions. Also sorry about the rant but I just thought this was a very bizzare and premature development of the client and was baffled there wasn't as much ranting about it on here as deflation by now

They should be optional in the next version, which is due out soon. Additionally, minimum fees are going to be lowered in the version after that.

I just realised that when i tried to download it again. So then the question remains why the optional fees are no longer optional...

That's the latest stable version. It's called that because the bitcoin software as a whole is considered to be "in beta".

use 0.3.20 i do

My fee setting is 0.00

I am using 0.3.21-beta

It does not allow me to send any BC out with the setting to 0.00
I get dialouge boxes saying that the transaction is either to complex or above the size limit and and it is impossible to send the BitCoins with it. The fees are NOT optional in this version of the client, at least not on my account.

works fine for me. the transactions are a bit slow, but they are full working
i don't want to pay fees before the reward for a block reaches 6.25 btc.
The reward now is 50, and i think that is a fine reward, for solving a block, i don't think we should give fee to the miners they are earning enough for now.

im not saying fees are bad or any think and i think the miners should berewardet for the work they do for bitcoin, but no fee for now.

Yes.

Go into your settings and set fees to 0 if you want to try to send transactions without fees. I don't know how well it works; good luck.

With the newest client I can not send any BC at from my account without paying fees.

Most of my BC are from a single transaction days old with hundreds of confirmations. Fees are onbiously not necessary since incomming micro payments from older clients arrive just fine and get confirmed. I though the fees where supposed to remain optional and it would just take ages to send without a fee once the transactions/processing power ratio becomes something else then what it is now. So what is the reason for the new client not letting me send bitcoins without fees? I will just use an older client for micro-payments anyway this seems is rediculus tbh...

Another issue that you don't get any fees back by mining. With 20000khash running 24/7 I get like 1/lots of thousands of 0.09 in fees for a block from the pool. Is this really an accurate reprensentation of how much transaction data my 20000khash can help process in relation to what I am being forced to pay in fees by the new client? I sure hope not because then this network seems doomed when people start sending money around.
I would not mind paying fees to miners at all if you could actually earn it back if you provided as much processing power as you take from the network ... but this doesn't seem to be the case at all.

I have probably missed something so please set me staight or make this make sense. Thank you.