This change is per discussion at http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=8153.0;
Added ability to estimate the transaction fee for a given transfer amount. Use case concerns transferring BTC out of an "account", and being able to determine if the account has enough BTC to cover transfer + fees.
The problem is that some (intended) indetermism is present while generating a transaction, which may influence the size of a transactions and thus its fee according to a certain policy. I believe the correct way should be that payment RPC's take an additional argument that states that no actual payment only the creation of a transaction is required. The created transaction can then be inspected, and through another call rejected or accepted.
Can you rebase this into one commit? Also, I agree with sipa on the proper way to do this. I'm hoping someone redoes all the UI for transaction fees for 0.4.0.
Sipa - so, you're suggesting we update the send payment RPCs to return transaction details, instead of just the Transaction ID, then include a new flag that indicates a fake transaction? Or, would we have a non-committed transaction that I could still query by txn ID?
Alternatively, we could keep the estimate call, then include a "max tx fee" parameter on the send payment RPC, so it fails if the tx fee ends up over the given amount. From my perspective, I'm always making these calls from inside a transaction, so I don't mind a later call failing, since it's easy for me to re-run the whole transaction.
Finally, I'm new to git, how do I rebase? Just create a new branch and make all the changes in one push?
Accidentally closed while trying to rebase, opening new pull request.