I don't know, then. Either it's a fee schedule imposed by the creator of that client fork, or you had a massive number of inputs.
Transaction fees are imposed for two reasons:
1) The "age" of the inputs being used
2) The amount being sent
Had you just received these funds into an address and then immediately turned around to send them to another address? Then that requires a fee, especially if the amount is "small".
The mainline code had the minimum transaction fee set to 0.0005 on June 5th:
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commit/352b4ea5b924412f3485290123fdf538cfdd8aa8From Gavin on Transaction fee charges:
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/issues/170Low-priority transactions (where priority is determined by bitcoin amount and age of the inputs) require a fee. You sent a very-small (0.03 BTC) transaction that came from a few-hours-old transaction.
That is by design, to discourage sending lots of very-small transactions (also known as "penny flooding").
the sender to include them. If the fee is not paid on a low priority transaction, then the transaction is simply ignored by the miners until it's old enough that it's priority is above the minimum. I've done this many times when not under time pressure. This fee must be required by his client for some reason.