Agree.

All the information's publicly posted, so I don't see why it would be too difficult for a client to pull this information.

It should be noted that a .0005BTC bid is not equal among miners, core rules ignored for a minute. Certain pools create certain allowances, bans, and modifiers for different transactions, as well as perhaps certain entities. The SDice patch is a good relevant example. The worrisome spat of no-tx blocks a while back is also a good example of "the rules" being modified - because the rules are more default settings than rules, as I understand it. If you made Luke-Jr really mad, for instance, he may have Eligius ignore all transactions coming from addresses known to be yours., and IIRC, Eligius is known for having irregular bid rules.

Thus, there probably isn't particularly accurate information on whether or not the particular tx you send out will be included in the next block. But, you could get a fuzzy idea using simple information, assuming everyone uses the default bid weight settings.

Thanks for that! I don't imagine for a moment that I could sway everyone single-handedly, but I hope this discussion helps! Until recently I wasn't 100% certain about the 'fees' really being bids -- perhaps there was some special trick or unique behaviour that made them different? But it never added up -- a 'fee' that you could alter or choose to not pay altogether, and then the request might or might not not get accepted regardless?? So now I've made this thread and hope that as many people as possible start using the more standard terminology.

Yep. Scraping data from the block-chain blockchain.info etc. I think I've already seen a site that shows a bid vs confirmation time scatter-plot, so I think it would be nice to have something along those lines integrated into a wallet client.


I guess people could even investigate individual Pools' pricing policies, so that you end up with per-pool price indicators... It just all requires time and effort, I guess.


Quite possible. With multi-sig transactions starting to come out, I can imagine all kinds of cool possibilities e.g.: miners gain loyal customers who have their transactions cleared exclusively through them. It's just that calling bids 'fees' so confusing!

If they were called bids, then I would assume that I could increase my bid at any time - which would actually be pretty cool. If I'm not seeing my 0.0005 BTC "bid" getting through in 30 minutes or so and I'm getting kind of frustrated, I could double or triple my bid to increase the likelihood of it going through in the next few minutes.

Never underestimate how much semantics affect people's ability to think clearly.

Your suggestion is extremely valuable, in my opinion, and there are quite a few other misnomers in the Bitcoin world and especially surrounding the blocksize issue. Using accurate terminology is crucial for arriving at sound judgments.

Why is there need for much discussion at all ?
Garvin and related devs should be offered a look at the situation and see if they wish to just change the label in the official client.
Or in the alternative clients devs should be informed about this thoughtframeshift.

Increasing the bid should be part of the core functions of the official client - i imagine that your unconfirmed transactions should have the ability to update the bid higher - never lower.

Create a double spend transaction with the same inputs and outputs, but a different "confirmation urgency bid"

Currently most clients in the network will block/not relay this second transaction though.

I'm going to take a wild guess and say it's because they're called ”fees” in the Bitcoin client.