Why does Armory enforce a minimum transaction fee?

When I send coins using the standard bitcoin.org client I can set the transaction fee to 0. However in Armory client there is a transaction fee of .0005 and you cannot override it to less.

I was under the impression that transaction fees were set by the user, and that the transaction fee determined the priority of your transaction on the network...so why does Armory force this?

In fact when I sent coins with fee of 0 via bitcoin client it went through faster than when sending the coins back with a fee of 0.0005 with armory...?

David

Posted 2012-11-25T02:12:22.197

Reputation: 151

If the Bitcoin.org client sees that a fee is necessary, you must pay a fee. There's no way for you to force it to send without a fee if it thinks you should include a fee. Armory works the same way, no? – Stephen Gornick – 2012-11-25T04:04:27.617

1Also, the network doesn't know what client you used when sending. So your experience probably had less to do with whether a fee was paid or not and more to do with the age of the coins that were being used as inputs. – Stephen Gornick – 2012-11-25T04:06:50.693

1I sent .01 coins from bitcoin.org client, to an address in Armory wallet, set fee to zero. .01BTC arrived. I then tried to send the .01 back from Armory to my bitcoin.org wallet, it would not allow me to set a fee of zero, forced me to pay a fee of .005 so I was only able to send .095 back. Why did i pay no fees when sending from bitcoin.org client, but paid fee of .005 when sending from Armory client? – David – 2012-11-25T09:50:15.800

5Probably because when you sent from the Bitcoin.org client, the coins were old. When you sent from Armory, the coins were new. The fee algorithm is set to make new coins more expensive to send than older ones (more than a day old, for example, might be the threshold). – Stephen Gornick – 2012-11-29T07:34:09.087

Answers

If the coins it is using have a lot of confirmations, the less likely a fee is going to be needed.

In the instance reported here, when the payment was sent using the Bitcoin.org client the funds had many confirmations and no fee was required.

When a payment for that same amount was then created using Armory, the funds did not have many confirmations and thus the client insisted on there being a fee.

This is not a difference between Armory and the Bitcoin-Qt client. This is a difference between sending coins which had lots of confirmations versus sending coins which had fewer confirmations. The same thing would have happened regardless of which of the two clients was being used.

Stephen Gornick

Posted 2012-11-25T02:12:22.197

Reputation: 26 118

This answer doesn't seem to be correct. The coins I'm using have over 200 confirmations - and yet I still can't send them without a fee. That should be plenty, correct me if I'm wrong. – B T – 2014-09-18T23:40:56.580

I will try the experiment again but this time leave the coins a few days before sending them back, so that they have a similar number of confirmations as the original transaction. – David – 2012-11-30T00:54:06.100

I tried again, and still the same result. I have received .01 costs to my armory wallet (sent from bitcoin.org client with no fee). The coins now have 350 confirmations. I select to send .01 coins and set the fee to 0. When I click "send" armory pops up a message saying "You have specified a valid amount to send, but the required transaction fee causes this transaction to exceed your balance. In order to send this transaction, you will be required to pay a fee of 0.0005 BTC." – David – 2012-12-02T12:27:12.703