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One thing I don't get about bitcoin is how the transition from paying for mining to charging for transactions is going to be handled. This seems like a big upcoming change now all this money is sloshing about.

I take it the plan for transaction fees is carefully worked out to make it still be attractive to miners and merchants vs charges for visa etc or have I got the wrong end of the stick?

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There is no transition required. When send an amount of bitcoins to another address you specify how much of a transaction fee you are willing to pay to the miner who solves the block of transactions your transaction will be included in. Any given miner can prefer to solve transaction blocks with higher fees. Eventually it will get to the point that if you don't include a transaction fee your transaction will just be ignored and not included in the block chain. At the moment it will probably be included anyway because of the inherent reward for creating a valid transaction block.

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