BitcoinTalk

What's with this odd generation?

27
Satoshi-only
BitcoinTalk
#4
From:
satoshi
Subject:
Re: What's with this odd generation?
Date:
There's a small transaction fee for very large transactions.  The node that generates the block that contains the transaction gets the fee.

If the same money gets sent again, it won't incur the fee again.  If all you have is generated coins in your wallet, if you send them all in one huge transaction, it has to bundle hundreds of 50 bc coins together.  After that it's just one line to send the combined unit.
BitcoinTalk
#8
From:
satoshi
Subject:
Re: What's with this odd generation?
Date:
Quote from: theymos on February 12, 2010, 08:31:52 AM
Does the sending client send more BitCoins to account for the fee (so the recipient gets what he's expecting)?
Yes.

Quote from: SmokeTooMuch on February 12, 2010, 01:11:09 PM
why do we even need fees ? i thougt the no-fees-feature was one of the advantages of bitcoin ?!
Almost all transactions are free.  A transaction is over the maximum size limit if it has to add up more than 500 of the largest payments you've received to make up the amount.  A transaction over the size limit can still be sent if a small fee is added.

The average transaction, and anything up to 500 times bigger than average, is free.

It's only when you're sending a really huge transaction that the transaction fee ever comes into play, and even then it only works out to something like 0.002% of the amount.  It's not money sucked out of the system, it just goes to other nodes.  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
#10
From:
satoshi
Subject:
Re: What's with this odd generation?
Date:
Right.  Otherwise we couldn't have a finite limit of 21 million coins, because there would always need to be some minimum reward for generating.  In a few decades when the reward gets too small, the transaction fee will become the main compensation for nodes.  I'm sure that in 20 years there will either be very large transaction volume or no volume.