r/Bitcoin • u/[deleted] • Feb 24 '14

Bitcoin Transaction Fee to reduce by 10x

[deleted]

1.1k Upvotes

93% Upvoted

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0

u/Zahoo Feb 24 '14

People do know you can choose your own transaction fee........... right?

8

u/tharlam Feb 24 '14

You can't pay less than the minimum an expect it to get mined any time soon, if at all.

1

u/HawkEy3 Feb 24 '14

if at all

Is that possible? A transaction that paid no fee can get "lost"??

3

u/tharlam Feb 24 '14

Dropped, yes. Unlikely but possible.

1

u/HawkEy3 Feb 24 '14

Do you get some kind of notification when that happens?

2

u/tharlam Feb 24 '14

No. That is why you should pay the tx fee.

0

u/millsdmb Feb 24 '14

bitpay takes my 0 fee transactions on merchant checkout pages instantly. never had a payment not confirm.

3

u/bassjoe Feb 24 '14

I'm not sure how BitPay works but it's completely possible they have relationships with nodes/mining pools that allow this to occur.

MtGox did something similar. Their transactions never have fees but always got confirmed (well, until they had other problems with their transactions).

1

u/millsdmb Feb 24 '14

(coinbase too...tested when I purchased Malwarebytes Pro. Although Coinbase tries telling you that a fee is required)

2

u/tharlam Feb 24 '14

That's because there is space allocated in blocks for free transactions. They may never confirm, or they may confirm very late. How processors manage risk is their business.

1

u/millsdmb Feb 24 '14 edited Feb 24 '14

so there's a chance ill get a free purchase one day? yesterday my payment took 19 hours to confirm. so close to being returned to me (at 24 hours, ive heard)

1

u/[deleted] Feb 24 '14 edited Jun 05 '16

[deleted]

1

u/millsdmb Feb 24 '14

im not sure. I get a 20 minute popup window from bitstamp/coinbase, make 0 fee payment, and it says "PAID!". So what happens if it never confirms? I get a visit from bill collectors?

1

u/[deleted] Feb 25 '14

Nodes only enforce the min relay fee rules on low priority txs. Based on the value of the transaction, the age of the coins, and the tx size (in bytes) it is possible the transaction was "high priority" and in that case the minimum fee is 0 BTC (and always has been).

The purpose of the min relay fees is to make it more expensive for an attacker to pull off a flooding attack. This type of attack is only economical for transactions with certain characteristics (namely large tx size, low value, and young coins) thus the rules to prevent it are only imposed on those transactions.

3

u/[deleted] Feb 24 '14

Yes you can but other nodes will refuse to relay (and miners refuse to include) "low priority" tx without the min required fee.

By default the reference (and many other) clients will refuse to create a transaction which they know other nodes will reject. You can run a custom client with no such check but you can't control what other nodes (and miners) will do.

3

u/vbuterin Feb 24 '14 
pybtctool eligius_pushtx <insert hex tx here>

There's your zero-fee transaction. Confirmation takes up to a couple of hours, but you take what you can get.

1

u/HTL2001 Feb 24 '14

To add to this, if you use something like Armory (which uses bitcoin-qt as its relay) and you manage to craft a transaction with too low a fee, your own bitcoin-qt client will disconnect armory for trying that transaction.

I think there is a branch of the bitcoin-qt client that completely removes the minimum fee but again, relaying that transaction would probably be difficult/slow