$82,982,977 USD: $ 0.04 Transaction Fee

[MCRed]

This is great. I think the downside, though, is the $0.04 transaction that incurs a $0.04 transaction fee.

For instance, there's this transaction for .02 BTC that incurred a $0.19 fee. https://blockchain.info/tx/a2933a1dc53361a7770c2a9d998c1fe30...

I'm not sure why this tiny transaction cost so much more than the huge one, but being able to support 0.00045 BTC transactions at reasonable cost is the challenge.

This isn't just a fee challenge, but a blockchain-bloat challenge as well.

But if it can be solved, I think it would be a turning point for BTC.

[diego]

It's not that transactions "incur" a fee. You pay the fee you want, and miners prioritize transactions accordingly. Because transactions take up space in the block chain (and everyone's hard drives), small transactions are given less priority. Large transactions usually don't need to pay fees to be mined, small transactions may take a long time to be mined (or in the case of "dust" not be mined at all) unless you pay the recommended fee.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction_fees

[d23]

> But if it can be solved, I think it would be a turning point for BTC.

Really? I find it hard to believe that the thing preventing widespread bitcoin adoption at the moment is transaction fees.

[placeybordeaux]

Generally the very large transactions are even cheaper because transactions are prioritiezed based off of (BTC * time spent sitting)/bytes.

It's a very regressive system, but is entirely about ensuring that 'dust' doesn't clog up the blockchain.

[tinco]

I think because of the design of bitcoin $0.04 transactions are something they want to actively discourage. From what I understand of Bitcoin, the future will hold only large-scale transactions like this one, and as little sub-dollar transactions as possible. (because the network load of the system scales with the transaction quantity)

[williamcotton]

Transactions without fees will eventually be processed and normally within 24 hours in my experience.

On top of that miners are currently processing transactions with fees of 1000 satoshis with no delay. That's about $0.004 with the current exchange.

[eugeneionesco]

I think this is a non-issue since you're not even able to make such small value transations with traditional banking tools.

[hkmurakami]

Having been recently charged a 4% worse FX rate than the going rate in an 5-figure international wire transfer, a world where the current financial transaction system is torn apart cannot come fast enough!

[benpbenp]

For this kind of transfer I recently discovered and have saved tons of money using TransferWise. Their model is to charge a moderate upfront fee (0.5% for £200 and up), but then after that they complete the currency conversion always at the exact mid-market rate. The fee may sound like a lot at first, but as you discovered, all the banks "hide" their fee in atrocious exchange rates, such as the 4% mark-up you experienced.

Some downsides are that they don't support every currency yet (cf. https://transferwise.com/support/customer/en/portal/articles...), and they can be significantly slower than banks.

Anyway, here, use my link and I get some money. (and you get a free transfer up to £3000): https://transferwise.com/u/85ec4

[mlrtime]

If you do this transfer often I recommend moving your currency to a brokerage and then doing a FX trade. You will often get close to BBG spot rate using IB.

[kolev]

With price fluctuations of Bitcoin, 4% could be a pretty good deal!

[ufmace]

I've never moved around tens of millions of dollars, so I don't know what the usual procedures and fees are. I have moved thousands around between accounts, and the fee is a couple of dollars, a tenth of a percent. It's hard to believe that the fee percentage for a normal wire transfer for those amounts is higher than that.

Given that, this doesn't seem like much of a big deal. I suppose it's neat, but when you're working with that much money, does a few tens of dollars matter?

Considering also that moving any significant amount of this money to Fiat to actually purchase anything will likely be massively difficult, involve huge fees and delays, and may even distort the entire exchange market, and it seems even less useful.

Infact, the largest USD exchange seems to be https://www.bitfinex.com right now, and this transaction represents around 2 weeks of their volume. It might well take months to convert this to USD without causing too much market distortion.

On an unrelated note, damn the CNY exchange volume is massive, and seems to dwarf the total USD volume. I wonder what's up with that?

[natrius]

Most CNY exchanges don't have trading fees. As a result, comparing their volumes to USD exchanges isn't really meaningful.

[cbhl]

CNY has currency controls on moving money into and out of the country. Bitcoin, less so.

[deweller]

For those here who are wondering if bitcoin use is growing, here is a graph of transactions over time:

https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions?timespan=all

[pcrh]

How come that doesn't correlate with this graph showing the dollar value of transactions:

https://blockchain.info/charts/estimated-transaction-volume-...

[vectorpush]

I hope that the recipient intends to use those funds on the darknet or overstock.com, otherwise the fees for converting even a fraction of that sum into usable money will greatly exceed $0.04.

[scintill76]

In other words, dollars weren't actually moved, 217.5k BTC were. I like Bitcoin, but you're right, and I'm getting annoyed with Bitcoiners' self-congratulation over things like this. Moving millions isn't exactly an every-day problem for most people, and even in more realistic scenarios, network transaction fees aren't the only cost and are much smaller than the other costs.

[debacle]

Does bitcoin have the kind of volume/liquidity to make that kind of exchange without causing a significant disturbance in the exchange rate?

[Tech1]

Any guesses if this is related to the Silk Road coins the feds auctioned off not too long ago? Or the even more recent second auction?

[Alupis]

unlikely since the bidding is still going/just-started.

[bhouston]

Who has $82M in Bitcoins?

[wmf]

Keep in mind that some companies keep all their customers' BTC in one big "account".

[sp332]

At least one of the earlier transactions I found browsing around was involved in the BitStamp audit.

[thisjepisje]

Lots of early adopters (used to) have thousands of btc.

[greenleafjacob]

If it was a credit card transaction, it'd be 2,406,506.

[serve_yay]

If grandma had balls she'd be grampa. Nobody moves 82 million with a credit card, that's not even what they're for.

[ceejayoz]

Anyone doing that volume in credit card transactions isn't paying a 2.9% rate like you and I would selling trinkets... and the fee's paying for a variety of protections not present in a Bitcoin transaction.

[stonogo]

If it were a credit card transaction, money would have changed hands.

[matthewarkin]

A whole $.10 cheaper than sending a FedWire! that's <insert really small percent that I'm too lazy to do the math on>% cheaper!