Quote from: defxor on August 06, 2011, 09:51:06 AM

Quote from: mcfe on August 06, 2011, 08:43:28 AM

Maybe this problem will motivate you to send fees. Like i always do.

Quote from: deepceleron on August 06, 2011, 09:35:03 AM

If you sent without fees, then you would have used an altered client that doesn't comply with the fee rules

Wait, what? None of the two replies above have anything to do with the issues discussed in this thread.

(TX not getting sent at all is not due to fees and fee-less .24 is a configuration option and not something "altered")

In my case I have two identical clients where one cannot send while the other can. I've even copied the blockchain between them so I know it's not corrupt.

I am referring to the case of the original poster, not your followup posts which may or may not be the same issue. At this time I have not reviewed what you have posted closely, but it is important to note how the Bitcoin transaction fee policies come about:

-0.01 BTC fee per kilobyte of transaction, but:
-If the blocksize (size of all transactions currently waiting to be included in a block) is less than 27 kB, transactions are free.
-If the blocksize is more than 250 kB, transactions get increasingly more expensive as the blocksize approaches the limit of 500 kB. Sending a transaction when the blocksize is 400 kB will cost 5 times the normal amount; sending when it's 499 kB will cost 500x, etc.

-If the blocksize is over 4kB, free transactions in the above rules are only allowed if the transaction's priority is above a certain level.

-Transactions within each fee tier are prioritized based on several factors. Most importantly, a transaction has more priority if the coins it is using have a lot of confirmations. Someone spamming the network will almost certainly be re-using the same coins, which will lower the priority of their transactions. Priority is also increased for transactions with more BTC, and reduced for transactions with more data.

You can see the more factors in play, the lower the priority. Version 0.3.23 requires a minimum of .0005 BTC for low priority transactions.

This means there are several factors involved whether the bitcoind that p2p network members and miners are using relays a transaction or includes it in a block, and the newer version of bitcoind have different rules.

I can deduce from the screenshot that the original poster's bitcoin address is 1NUd7YZYkVYoue7BgY6URsfKCLDRnu7CgL. Here are the transactions that were picked up:

http://blockexplorer.com/tx/fc7f3b9b37ebd99a5c4479938f017425457aa392478dae4deed20382cf7a0778#i621162
fee paid: 0

http://blockexplorer.com/tx/4b66d56b8b9fed33f94c21082b6f0756c407c6f41e967dcf94b304c67210b3cb#i727079
fee paid: 0

http://blockexplorer.com/tx/400f321bf6d058d5ed59acc18a25cbf16976fc96bf13f7009c435f307c637209#i872806
fee: 0

http://blockexplorer.com/tx/e995efbd5e993293e393f4b92e3d082f6be4bfa3f05bb7bfc0681dcdd2fd8d4f#i888845
fee: 0

(un-relayed transaction here)

http://blockexplorer.com/tx/cdce1cf30ab041015ae5150eaa8702bf1d37ab1d27c50030bcbc8f6cc4184951#o0
fee: .1

As we can see, there's a lot of no-fee paying. If you read the rules above, you see that several factors affect whether a free transaction gets forwarded or included in the block chain - how many other transactions are already waiting to be included in a block, how recent the coins are that are being used (note the original poster just received a payment the day before, new coins could have been used in the transaction), the size of the transaction, etc. The current bitcoin client will evaluate these rules and indicate the fee to be paid on the transaction, and the other clients know these rules and can decide to toss it in the bit bucket if it doesn't qualify to be free. Note that the client version of other clients on the network gets updated, so previously lenient rules may be more enforced.

While you can set the TXFEE=0 in the newest client's config file, it will not allow you to send transaction that would require a minimum fee (at least not without some hacking or using a non-official version). If the newest mainline client doesn't prompt for a fee, that's because you are in the rare position of using old coins, there are low transactions waiting on the network, and the size of the transfer in KB is small (mainly because you are spending just coins from a single input.)