Re: [bitcoin-dev] consensus rule change for TX fee safety

[Marco Falke <falke.marco@gmail.com>]

2016-03-03 16:28 GMT+01:00 Peter Todd via bitcoin-dev
<bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org>:
> Bitcoin Core already implements this safety limit with the "absurd fee"
> limit of 10000 * the minimum relay fee. This limit is active in both the
> wallet and the sendrawtransaction RPC call. Additionally for the wallet
> there is a user configurable -maxtxfee option to limit fees set by the
> wallet which currently defaults to 0.1 BTC.


It is planned for Bitcoin Core 0.13 to use -maxtxfee for both, the
wallet and the RPC interface (sendrawtransaction). (c.f.
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/7084)

In regard to the issue, I agree with Jonas. Such large transaction
fees were historically caused by no or insufficient warnings from the
wallet software. And it's the responsibility of the operators to make
the wallet user friendly.

Apart from that, there are legit use cases where one would want to
"pay" a large transaction fee: It may be convenient for the miner to
just collect the fees instead of sending back the change on their own
transactions. Of course making sure to mine the high-fee tx themself.
Moreover, it could increase privacy if another party decides to "wash"
their bitcoins by letting the miner claim the "fee" and then have the
miner send back a fraction of the fee to a fresh address. Though, this
probably works best if a lot of participants are doing this.

Marco