Bitcoin-QT's transaction fee

Bitcoin broke below the important support level at $600 today. Prices traded as low as $592.07 earlier in the day before rebounding somewhat. One bitcoin is currently trading at $597.01 on BTC-E. The same downward pattern was present on BitStamp, BTC/USD is quoted at $595.50 on the exchange.

The move down seems to be largely technical based as no major news hit the market in the last 24 hours. The main bitcoin client just had a major release Bitcoin (v0.9.0). One of the most important changes is that the minimum recommended fee has just been slashed tenfold. At today’s prices of around $600, the new fee equates to a fee of 0.6 US cents. The change will make the upcoming virtual currency even more suitable for internet micro-transactions.

‘’This release drops the default fee required to relay transactions across the network and for miners to consider the transaction in their blocks to 0.01mBTC per kilobyte. Note that getting a transaction relayed across the network does NOT guarantee that the transaction will be accepted by a miner’’

Keep in mind that this fee is the minimum recommended fee for the Bitcoin-qt client. It was setup to prevent so called ‘’spam’’ transactions. The actual fee will be decided by the bitcoin miners themselves. They will have the final say as to which transactions get prioritized and included in the blockchain, same as before. However, with most of miners income still coming from mining bitcoin blocks and not relaying transactions, it seems likely that the new reduced fee will ‘’catch on’’.

The other notable change in the v0.9.0 release include some fixes to the Transaction malleability issue as well as numerous other bug fixes. The client is now available in a 64-bit version for Windows users. Support for earlier Mac versions has been dropped, the minimum specs for running the bitcoin-qt client are now a 64-bit-capable CPU and Mac OS 10.6 or later. You can read the rest of the changes here.

Bitcoin Breaks Below $600, Minimum Fee Slashed Tenfold