What is the simplest way to send bitcoin without fee (fee=0)? It seems that many wallets (including Bitcoin Core 24.0.1) do not permit users to set 0 fee for a transaction.
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1Does this answer your question? How can I avoid paying transaction fees?– RedGrittyBrickCommented Jan 23, 2023 at 13:13
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Mine a block or have a friend mine the block.– MercedesCommented Jan 23, 2023 at 17:08
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For what purpose would a 0 fee be practical? If you are the one mining the block setting a higher fee would actually benefit your mempool fee reward theoretically, also you wouldn't easily be able to permit access to these fees as they would be abused by anyone trying to lower their fee. So its some kind of a permission-ed setup that is not easily automate-able and lowers your block reward if used at scale.– PoseidonCommented Feb 8, 2023 at 17:57
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3 Answers
Full nodes do not propagate transactions that offer less than the minimum relay transaction fee. By default, this setting is 1 sat/vB. If you were to create a transaction with a lower feerate and submitted it on the open network, it would probably not reach the miners.
You would need to convince a miner that they should include your transaction and give it to them directly. This is extra work for the miner and you're not providing any monetary incentive as the fees are set to zero. There is little reason for a miner to acquiesce to such a request.
The simplest way would probably be to try and build a public movement that convinces one or multiple miners that they should generally set their minimum feerate to zero. People have tried that a few times already, it does not seem to have a lot of support.
To build a transaction with zero fee, you would first configure your own node to permit a feerate of zero (to allow your own node to propagate it). I don't think your wallet will ever build a zero-fee transaction, so you'd probably have to build it manually with createrawtransaction. There may be other libraries that make this easier, but I'm not sure anyone has bothered because such transactions are usually not processed by miners today.
I found that the simplest way to send bitcoin without fee (fee=0) is offered in GUI in Electrum. The createrawtransaction RPC in Bitcoin Core is more complex due to manually assembling hex string of a transaction.
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Yes, there is an example of the recent 0 fee transaction on the Bitcon mainnet: mempool.space/tx/… Commented Feb 9, 2023 at 8:36
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I hadn’t seen this one, but the exceptionality of transaction with 0-fee getting confirmed even sparks debates on social media. What I meant to ask was whether you have seen any of your transactions get included without fees, or expect that to work. I’ve looked at the mempool and blockchain multiple times in the past years and there always are megabytes of txs waiting, but even empty blocks never pick these up (except when it looks like the miner did it for themselves or as part of a gag).– Murch ♦Commented Feb 9, 2023 at 12:05
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1Your transaction actually underscores my perception: on 22nd of December over 60 MvB of transactions bidding less than 1 ṩ/vB were waiting for confirmation, yet even this block that included a 0-fee transaction did not fill up the rest of the block with other transactions paying 0-fee.—It stands to reason that the miner manually greenlighted this single transaction.– Murch ♦Commented Feb 9, 2023 at 12:11
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2I just had another look at this transaction you linked above (be62f562…490d6734). It had been CPFPed to an effective feerate of 7.71 ṩ/vB. I am still surprised that it got to miners in the first place, but someone did pay for it to get mined.– Murch ♦Commented Oct 11, 2023 at 15:17
I'll try to summarize near everything one should know about transaction fees when sending bitcoins and the options to lower it down:
1. For plain on-chain bitcoin transfers there's no way to avoid the miner's fee because this is in the nature of the blockchain.
1.1. Unless you are being a miner yourself and can directly set your software to sign your own transaction and thus add it to the next block, or ask a miner to do so, as @Murch has stated above.
2. Wallet applications most of the time do not charge a fee for using the app, however there's still the blockchain fee, which does not depend on the wallet app.
3. One may try to lower the blockchain fee by using Lightning Network, but it may not be applicable to all the use cases.
4. Some applications (mostly exchanges) do allow users to send bitcoins to each other within their system and do not charge a any fee. In this case it's literally "fee=0" but those transfers a off-chain! And there's no blockchain transaction involved.
Examples of these apps are well known:
Less major ones would be:
Please keep in mind when using any wallet application that you only control your coins if you control your wallet private key! Not your key, not your coins.
