Question on Transaction Fee and TX input/output, technically

gmaxwell

staff

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Quote from: iacz489 on July 12, 2014, 07:19:40 PM

As we know Bitcoin currently has a minimum transaction fee threshold of 0.0001 BTC (10^4 Satoshi).

It most certantly does not.

In any case, many (most?) miners do "regard" fees below some threshold as zero in order to prevent people from jumping the queue just by paying an infinitesimal fee... but they still collect it all the same, they just treat it as zero when prioritizing.

DannyHamilton

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Quote from: iacz489 on July 12, 2014, 09:24:21 PM

I was a bit confused by your saying miners "claim" their reward. I know miners claim the mining rewarding by generation transactions with outputs to their own addresses. But as to the transaction fees, does it simply work in the way that the
transaction fee=input sum-output sum
and this difference goes as money belong to the block of specific miners?
I might be making mistakes and please correct me if I did. Thanks.

Miners claim their reward by creating a generation transaction that has no inputs and that assigns one or more outputs.

The protocol limits the value of the sum of the outputs in the generation transaction to be less than or equal to the sum of the block subsidy (currently 25 BTC) AND the transaction fees of all transactions that the miner includes in the block.

The sum of the transaction fees of all transactions in the block can be calculated as the sum of all inputs in the block minus the sum of all non-generation outputs in the block. Another way to look at it is that the sum of all output in the block (including the generation transaction) must be less than or equal to the sum of the block subsidy AND all the inputs in the block.

iacz489

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I was a bit confused by your saying miners "claim" their reward. I know miners claim the mining rewarding by generation transactions with outputs to their own addresses. But as to the transaction fees, does it simply work in the way that the
transaction fee=input sum-output sum
and this difference goes as money belong to the block of specific miners?
I might be making mistakes and please correct me if I did. Thanks.

DannyHamilton

legendary

Activity: 3472

Merit: 4801

Quote from: iacz489 on July 12, 2014, 07:48:39 PM

So you mean that if such a transaction is submitted to a miner who is willing to confirm it, this 519 Satoshi will belong to the miner still?

Yes. Miners in current times reliably claim as part of their block reward all transaction fees from all transactions that they confirm.

Note, that the protocol does not REQUIRE that the miner claim the entire reward that they are due. If a miner wants to claim a smaller reward (and be less profitable?), they can do so and the unclaimed portion of the reward will simply cease to exist.

There was a time in the early days of bitcoin where a bug in someone's mining code caused the miner to claim a smaller reward. Therefore there are slightly less bitcoins in existence than there otherwise could be.

azeteki

member

Activity: 96

Merit: 10

esotericnonsense

Quote from: iacz489 on July 12, 2014, 07:48:39 PM

So you mean that if such a transaction is submitted to a miner who is willing to confirm it, this 519 Satoshi will belong to the miner still?
I guess this should sound stupid but I just want details clarified. Thank you.

If said miner chooses to claim it (as any rational miner should), yes.

iacz489

newbie

Activity: 7

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So you mean that if such a transaction is submitted to a miner who is willing to confirm it, this 519 Satoshi will belong to the miner still?
I guess this should sound stupid but I just want details clarified. Thank you.

azeteki

member

Activity: 96

Merit: 10

esotericnonsense

The transaction fee 'minimum' is a node-level construct. It applies to relaying of transactions.

Miners do not have to consider this. They are free to set fee policy as they wish.

The fee does exist. It is just considered as zero for relaying purposes.

I am not sure how transaction fee relay rules functioned in September 2012. Under the current system this transaction would not be relayed and would have to be submitted to, or produced by, a miner directly.

An interesting quirk is that miners are also free to choose not to claim fees, in which case they are indeed destroyed.
A miner can produce a block with a coinbase of 0 BTC if they so wished, I believe. It would just be a rather irrational choice.

iacz489

newbie

Activity: 7

Merit: 0

As we know Bitcoin currently has a minimum transaction fee threshold of 0.0001 BTC (10^4 Satoshi). During the process I make analysis of transactions within the recent two years, I found many transactions that has an (input sum-output sum) lower than 0.0001BTC, which is not considered a valid transaction fee (therefore 0 transaction fee).
For example, the tx with ID ef375a852af090f092426c3dc9e8879eef512c338cbf30b83951cff9196c9862 has only 519 more satoshi in the input sum than the outputs, so this single transaction is considered a 0-fee transaction.
My QUESTION is, in the above case, what happens to the difference of 519 Satoshi? Is this still claimed by the miner, or this tiny amount of money simply goes destroyed?

Topic: Question on Transaction Fee and TX input/output, technically (Read 1159 times)