Hacker News Reader

Comment by ubersync | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoin totally makes sense for digital products, especially for transaction with small amounts. With Bitcoin you can send even $0.01 for a very low fee.

View on HN

Default fee for a transaction is 0.0001, which is ~$0.0355 at current bitcoin price.

The default relay fee is actually now 1,000 satoshis (0.00001), not 10,000 satoshis (0.0001).

Who is that fee paid too?

Essentially the fee is split up by everyone who is running the nodes that make up the Bitcoin network. The more hash-power you have the larger your share of the fees.

this is incorrect, the transaction fee is paid to the miner that first includes your transaction in a block. this is their incentive for including transactions in blocks.

the miner that includes your transaction in a block. the first miner to do so gets the transaction fee, hence you can pay a high fee and guarantee it is included or pay a standard fee and it will probavly be included in the next 2-3 blocks or if you are not in a rush you can send it with no fee (providing it meets a few other criteria) and it will get processed usually within 24 hours.

the miners are the people that produce new bitcoins and secure the network.

As a reward to the miner of the block, no?

In the current reference clients, transactions smaller than 1000 bytes and less than 0.01 BTC are sent without a transaction fee.

i dont think the value is as important as the transaction size. I can send 10BTC for free, especially if the coins have not been moved for more than say a week. In fact smaller transactions are usually more costly (as a % of the sum being sent) than large transactions, see the recent US marshalls auctin as an example, $30M sent for $0.37.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com