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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?
Why is the transaction fee a multiple of the amount I want to send?
Answers
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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.
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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.
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 Eldredge – 2014-01-19T19:10:56.470
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@NateEldredge: Then why is "cheap micropayments" explicitly listed as a feature? (See http://bitcoin.org/en/bitcoin-for-developers)
– cHao – 2014-01-20T01:51:51.637@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 Eldredge – 2014-01-20T02:06:32.240
@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. – cHao – 2014-01-20T02:13:34.110
@cHao: The whole site is on Github; if you have better language in mind, why not submit a pull request? https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin.org/blob/master/_translations/en.yml
– Nate Eldredge – 2014-01-20T02:19:13.407@NateEldredge: Because it's not my job. I don't care about Bitcoin or its success yet. I have no BTC, and haven't decided yet whether it's even worth the time and trouble to invest. And from my POV, misinformation isn't a bug to fix -- it's a red flag. – cHao – 2014-01-20T02:28:52.843
let us continue this discussion in chat
– Nate Eldredge – 2014-01-20T05:38:20.787There are plenty other crypto-coins that are worth less than Bitcoin and/or with lower transaction fees. As of late a lot of people are sending dogecoins as tips for "good deeds" or to compensate writers of interesting articles. With dogecoins about 100 satoshis and bitcoin around USD $830, sending 250 doges would give receiver around 20 cents of dollar, transaction fees of just 1 doge - now THAT is a very cheap micro payment by all accounts. – Joe Pineda – 2014-01-21T01:58:05.233