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I'm new on coinbase.com, and it looks like (surprisingly), when I order a 0.1 bitcoin transfer to somebody's address, then if I look at the transaction on blockchain.info
Who pays the network fees? Coinbase on their own money (sounds very surprising)?
At the time of the question being posted, Coinbase was paying your transfer fees. Starting on March 21st 2017, they stopped paying the transfer fee and the user now pays the fee. Coinbase has blog post about it here: https://blog.coinbase.com/coinbase-spring-cleaning-4f27710ff821#.b8hzpa2hb
Yes, they do. Apparently they have a big enough cashflow and a good enough optimization algorithm to make this worth for them.
More info on the way they do it here
The current situation is that Coinbase does not pay the transaction fee.
Using the Send page, I just received the warning:
You don't have enough funds in this account for this transaction. Please try again with a smaller amount.
The warning actually means, "You cannot choose to send all your BTC. You must have enough BTC remaining to satisfy the transaction fee, too."
When you look one line above Total, there is a field named Network fee. For the transaction at the time, it showed the value 0.0004068 BTC.
The field has a tooltip bubble which displays more detail as you mouse over:
This fee is charged by the network to process a transaction. Coinbase does not get any portion of this fee.
After re-calculating, and accounting for enough remaining BTC to cover the transaction fee, then Coinbase accepted the Send request.
This is new behavior. I know it did not work like this on March 9th (today is the 27th). So this is a relatively new update.
