Quote from: freemanjackal on February 09, 2017, 10:27:52 PM

you have made great job so far, the site is fast and very functional. i just have a question, a doubt from searching blocks in your site. the first blocks dont collected any fees, when was that this started, to become a common practice. was this always meant to be?

Thank you.

Yes, that is correct, the first blocks did not collect any fees.

This is because fees are used as an incentive for miners to include transactions in to a block. For example, if a miner can only fit 1000 transactions in to a block, and there are 2000 transactions in the memory pool, the miner will select the top 1000 transactions with the highest fees. So if you want to ensure that your transaction gets mined quickly, you should add a juicy fee to it.

However, at the start of bitcoin there were not a lot of transactions, which meant that you didn't have to compete with other transactions for space in a block. Therefore, you could send a transaction with 0 fees, and a miner would probably include it in a block anyway.

Fees started being collected from blocks when there was more competition to get in to a block, and people started adding fees to their transactions.