Quote from: DeathAndTaxes on November 30, 2013, 05:44:02 AM

Quote from: bloss on November 30, 2013, 04:06:34 AM

The transaction fee is 0.001 BTC at MtGox. It is near the end of the press release.
https://www.mtgox.com/press_release_20131120.html

Then ask MtGox why they are ripping you off charging 20x what is necessary. Then look at how much they are actually paying. MtGox ripping customers off is nothing new it also has nothing to do with Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is starting to hit scaling problems. Look at Mt. Gox Bitcoin transactions unconfirmed after 2 hours. 155 in the queue right now, but numbers from 400 to 1000 have been seen. Also look at average transaction confirmation time. During busy periods, it's been spiking up lately. There's now enough transaction volume to temporarily saturate the network. This isn't happening all the time, but it is happening frequently now. Mt. Gox has been getting complaints about how long it takes to confirm transactions, so they've bumped up their fee to the point that theirs should get through.

Many of the mining pools are only generating 250K blocks as a default. The Bitcoin client can be configured for bigger blocks, but it doesn't have to be. There are negative incentives to miners in making their blocks bigger - their confirmations slow, and there's a risk of an orphan block. This is slowing confirmations. A bigger fee can get your transaction confirmed sooner. See https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=339505.0