I tried sending 0.0001 BTC from my blockchain.info wallet. It deducted 0.0009 BTC from my account, including a 0.0008 BTC is transaction fee.
Is it correct that the transaction fee is 8 times larger than the amount sent?
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2Bitcoin transaction fees are based mainly on the number of bytes in the transaction; they're not a percentage of the amount transacted. If you had sent BTC 1000, you'd still have paid BTC 0.0008. Bitcoin is not really intended for lots of very small transactions.– Nate EldredgeJan 19, 2014 at 19:10
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1@NateEldredge: Then why is "cheap micropayments" explicitly listed as a feature? (See bitcoin.org/en/bitcoin-for-developers)– cHaoJan 20, 2014 at 1:51
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@cHao: "Micro" is a relative term. They qualify it with "as low as a few dollars". The proposed transaction of 0.0001 BTC is only about 0.08 USD at today's prices.– Nate EldredgeJan 20, 2014 at 2:06
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@NateEldredge: And $.08 falls well within the realm of any meaningful use of the term in the real world. If "as low as a few dollars" is the cutoff for a "micropayment" in BTC, then clearly someone over there doesn't quite get what a micropayment actually is.– cHaoJan 20, 2014 at 2:13
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@cHao: The whole site is on Github; if you have better language in mind, why not submit a pull request? github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin.org/blob/master/_translations/en.yml– Nate EldredgeJan 20, 2014 at 2:19
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2 Answers
That's the recommended fee, the recommended fee is like the minimum amount to get your transaction included in a block ASAP. You should be able to set fees, but for small amounts like that a fee that large is common, remember, miners can only include so many transactions a block every 10 minutes, so they pick the transactions with the largest fee and smallest txn size.
The details about bitcoin fees are explained here. In short: If you don't pay fees for small amounts, it takes longer until your transactions are included in a block and thus confirmed (to avoid "dust" spam). For blockchain.info you can click on "Send Money" and then "custom" to specify 0 BTC for "Miners Fee". I don't see a problem with this, because they get 25 BTC anyway for mining a block.
