I was playing dice earlier and to my horror, the fee was 0.0335 BTC.. WTF??
The satoshi client has this code to calculate the required fee:
int64 nMinFee = (1 + (int64)nBytes 1000) * nBaseFee;
nBaseFee is 0.0005 BTC. So that's saying the fee is 0.0005 BTC per 1000 bytes (or part 1000 bytes) of transaction size.
0.0335 0.0005 = 67, so I'm guessing your transaction was between 66001 and 67000 bytes.
Probably you spent hundreds of tiny amounts in a single transaction. Maybe all you had left in your wallet was all the dust you got back from previous losing satoshidice bets.
I just checked the blockchain. There have been 17 satoshidice bets with 0.0335 BTC fees paid in the last day or so. 16 of them look like they're from the same person who just chose to pay a big fee for some reason:
1,
2,
3 are some examples. The 17th is probably yours,
here, but it's not as big as I thought it would be, so I don't understand why the fee is so high.