The Quotable Satoshi

Fees

Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System
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The incentive can also be funded with transaction fees. If the output value of a transaction is less than its input value, the difference is a transaction fee that is added to the incentive value of the block containing the transaction. Once a predetermined number of coins have entered circulation, the incentive can transition entirely to transaction fees and be completely inflation free.
Cryptography Mailing List
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Bitcoin P2P e-cash paper
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If you're having trouble with the inflation issue, it's easy to tweak it for transaction fees instead. It's as simple as this: let the output value from any transaction be 1 cent less than the input value. Either the client software automatically writes transactions for 1 cent more than the intended payment value, or it could come out of the payee's side. The incentive value when a node finds a proof-of-work for a block could be the total of the fees in the block.
BitcoinTalk
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Re: What's with this odd generation?
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In a few decades when the reward gets too small, the transaction fee will become the main compensation for nodes.
BitcoinTalk
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Re: What's with this odd generation?
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If you're sad about paying the fee, you could always turn the tables and run a node yourself and maybe someday rake in a 0.44 fee yourself.
BitcoinTalk
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Re: Always pay transaction fee?
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Another option is to reduce the number of free transactions allowed per block before transaction fees are required. Nodes only take so many KB of free transactions per block before they start requiring at least 0.01 transaction fee. The threshold should probably be lower than it currently is. I don't think the threshold should ever be 0. We should always allow at least some free transactions.
BitcoinTalk
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Re: Always pay transaction fee?
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Currently, paying a fee is controlled manually with the -paytxfee switch. It would be very easy to make the software automatically check the size of recent blocks to see if it should pay a fee. We're so far from reaching the threshold, we don't need that yet. It's a good idea to see how things go with controlling it manually first anyway.