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Why is geth not letting me post a transaction with a low gasPrice?

> ./geth console
> eth.sendTransaction({ "from": "...", "to": "...", "gas": "30000", "gasPrice": "10", "value": "0.1" })
Gas price too low for acceptance

My understanding of Ethereum is that gasPrice is set by the user and either a miner will process it or they won't (presumably based on the gas price). However, geth appears to be forcing me to pick a gasPrice that it believes is reasonable. The exact algorithm is unclear, but also irrelevant to my question. This behavior seems counter to the entire concept of market driven gas prices.

Is there a way I can tell geth, "no really, let me submit my transaction with a low gas price"? Am I misunderstanding the whole gas model? Is this a bug in geth?

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  • see this question: it's not a geth bug, it's how the system works. If your gas price is too low miners simply will not accept it.
    – Joël
    Feb 28, 2016 at 3:50
  • I think it's a questionable design choice to not allow the user to post transactions with arbitrary gas. What if a person has custom mining code that accepts low gas transactions from their own accounts?
    – Tjaden Hess
    Feb 28, 2016 at 4:01
  • @Joël The answer to the question you linked is Yes, you can [set the gas price to what ever you want]. This is contrary to both the behavior of geth and your response. I know miners won't accept it. That is different from geth not letting me post it.
    – Micah Zoltu
    Feb 28, 2016 at 5:41
  • @TjadenHess From everything I have read about Ethereum, not being able to post 1wei gas price transactions is not part of Ethereum design, which is why I believe it is a bug in geth. Also, people are able to do it as seen here: etherscan.io/tx/…. That was a few hours ago and it was successfully mined.
    – Micah Zoltu
    Feb 28, 2016 at 5:44
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    Yes, i meant that it was a strange choice by the geth devs not to allow that behavior, since it is allowed in the protocol
    – Tjaden Hess
    Feb 28, 2016 at 5:46

1 Answer 1

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This is a limitation of the 1.3.x stable branch. This check was already removed for own/local transactions in the 1.4 branch (https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/pull/1997), allowing you to insert transactions of even 0 gas price into your local node. The nodes in the network will still not accept anything lower than their configured limit nor forward such transactions (otherwise it would be a magnification DDOS attack). However if you manage to connect to a node that does (i.e. altruist miner), then you could relay your transactions to it.

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  • Per our discussion in the Gitter.im channel, I am not going to mark this as an answer because it sounds like things are going to change at some point and I don't believe Stack Exchange allows for un-answering questions. Once a solution to the general problem of market determined gas prices is figured out we can answer this question more permanently and mark it as such.
    – Micah Zoltu
    Mar 1, 2016 at 3:22
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    @MicahZoltu StackExchange allows un-accepting at any time.
    – q9f
    Mar 1, 2016 at 10:59

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