As long as even 1 bitcoin survives, it can be split into 10^{-8} parts, meaning there are 100,000,000 units...  which, admittedly, isn't enough pieces for a real economy, but in that drastic case, it'd be straightforward to modify bitcoin to divide into 10^{-16} parts, giving 10,000,000,000,000,000 units.  TL;DR: Uncle Sam would be graciously making everyone on this board into multibillionaires.  Come at me, bro!

Lolwut?  Ahh right I forgot, central banks love nothing more than distributing wealth out evenly among all the people.  They would NEVER support a system where a tiny percentage of the people control the majority of the wealth.

The inability to transfer less than 1 full bitcoin into your wallet is a limitation of whatever exchange you're using.  (With MtGox, it seems you can actually transfer decimal amounts, but not a smaller amount than 1 bitcoin.  E.g. you can transfer 5.1 bitcoins but not 0.1 bitcoins...)

The system "knows" to distribute your 1000$ coin to 1000 different people, because that's what you tell it to do...  the coin itself doesn't have anything stopping it from being split up..

Hey everyone.  Djproject here.  Really looking forward to the world of bitcoin.  Thinking of what sorts of services and products I can sell to add to the bitcoin economy.

I love the decentralization idea of Bitcoin.  My only question on that is:  when the computer first turns on and the client is loaded up and gets on the internet, how does it know who to connect to to join the network?  There must be some sort of central server (I've seen mention of IRC) it logs into.  Isn't there a risk Uncle Sam could take that down?

You are absolutely correct  .  By the exact same token, they can use their own custom client to get around the mandatory transaction fee.  What you independently discovered (and which I posted in another thread earlier) is:  anti-spamming measures on the client side cannot dissuade a determined attacker anyway.  That goes for whether it's a transitions-per-minute limit or whether it's a mandatory fee.  In short: only legitimate users are punished.

My transactions-per-minute proposal was meant to replace one ineffective spam guard with another ineffective spam guard (with fewer additional drawbacks).

The current setup, with a scary popup notice and, really, a very hefty fee, is really going overboard if it's just meant to "get people used" to an event which will happen many years from now.  The setup in the previous client, with an optional fee input box and a note about priority below it, was very good.  I really liked that, it reflected well on the currency   I hope to see that return...

By the way, even reducing it to .0001 is something of a bandaid fix.  A key virtue of bitcoins is the ability to do micro-transactions.  Personally, and I think I speak for many other webmasters, I'm quite willing to "risk it" a bit and accept micro-payments with low priority and it takes awhile for confirmations to come in.  People could cheat me, in theory (it would be a lot of work, to save pennies...) but statistically most customers won't do that.

Other P2P networks like bittorrent do not have anything like transaction fees.

Finally, as for spamming, I propose that instead of mandatory fees, we simply make the client refuse to send out more than X transactions per minute.

Thanks for all the hard work, BTW, I realized I was coming across as rather critical, I do appreciate all the effort you guys are doing for bitcoin.  I wish I could contribute myself but I only program in C.

...please, PLEASE ditch the mandatory transaction fees.  I want to start accepting microtransactions (like ~.01BTC or even much smaller) and this is impractical with a .01 mandatory transaction fee.  And I can hardly ask my users to go download a different client than the "main" client from the frontpage of bitcoin.org!

Hardcoded fees in the official client is a very bad idea.  In my opinion, the official bitcoin.org client needs to be updated ASAP to get rid of the .01 fee.  It is probably disincentivizing potential adopters.  Here are some things to consider:

* If somebody wants to DDOS the network, they aren't going to be stopped by a CLIENT-SIDE safety like this.  The fee punishes legitimate users and does NOT offer any real additional security.

* If anti-spam client-side safety IS going to be put in, it should simply be in the form of the client refusing to send more than X number of transactions per minute.  This, too, can be ignored by a determined attacker, of course...

* All the pro-bitcoin literature heavily emphasizes the way bitcoins can be broken down to 8 decimal places.  This is totally contradicted by a .01 hardcoded fee.  Sure, the fee will go down, you say...  but the damage is done, people trying the client TODAY are going to be thinking "WTF"

* What is the first thing someone wants to do when they get their first coins?  Give the currency a test drive!  Send .01 bitcoin to a friend or to yourself, just to see how things work.  Having an unexpected fee pop up at this particular time is simply a public-relations catastrophe.

* .01 is absolutely arbitrary.  What, did Satoshi do some multivariable calculus to find the optimal fee and it just HAPPENED to be a power of 10?  Yeah, right.  People see this arbitrary "magic" number and it costs the currency precious legitimacy.

In conclusion:  the automatic hardcoded fees need to be removed with high priority.  They are detrimental to the currency's uptake.  Lowering from .01 hardcoded to .005 hardcoded is a bandaid fix which does not really address the problem.  We need to go back to the earlier behavior of letting the user choose their own optional fee.

Hello, I would like to purchase around $250 worth of MtGox dollars using PayPal.  Please hit me up with a PM if you are willing to help.