So if walmart offers a contract to the miners/pool, does that mean you can target who processes your transaction? How would they do that?

Thanks, you answered a lot there (not just in this quote). I was wondering about the retailer angle, and perhaps them either buying a pool outright or starting their own, in which case the could drive the charges down long enough to drive away small miners, and raise charges up after that. But as long as we are ready to fire up the mining community again to drive them right back down I guess that keeps them in check.

This is a pretty cool system, I only watched it a little when it first came out and now one of my partners (IT security firm) is getting real interested in it (we now have two of our hash cracker boxes, running as miners) and has unleashed me to research the buhjeezus out of it. My first take on it was what happens when time runs out on it. That seems thoroughly defeated now. I still have tons more security questions but those will need to go to a different topic.

Thanks for the help, I had heard that you guys don't take criticism and questioning too well, glad to see that isn't the case.

So if miners can set a minimum fee to do a transaction then can't they ultimately lock the system up by charging extremely high fees? I know that would require cooperation among all of them to do it, but what stops that? Anything? I mean can't you ultimately end up with such high fees that the bulk of wealth ends up in their hands?

So I as the person wanting to do a transaction offer up a reward along with my transaction request in hopes someone grabs onto it to make it happen for me? It still a surcharge, I just get to define it and see if someone is willing to accept it?

So how does the transaction fee increase? Who enforces a fee for it, and doesn't that have an affect on the perceived value? In a way the node is essentially charging you a surcharge for the transaction you want (right?) so he can be profitable whereas now he is profitable because he gets awarded newly created coins.

Thanks, I actually just found that part. I'm still not convinced of the success of that model in the long run and "presumably" isn't very reassuring.

I can really overcomplicate this question by saying electricity costs are increasing and so on, but I'll make this real simple. If the system requires nodes doing crypto work to verify the coin and transaction and all that, and as a reward for contributing to this hive, the owner gets bitcoins, what happens when you reach the final bitcoin? So as the returns on investment diminish, why do people keep doing it? And if they all decide to stop, what happens to the value of a currency that depends on the hive in order to make transactions possible?

Thanks.