ELI10: What are the pros and cons of the new tx fee??

[Spekulatius]

I think many people here (including me) have not fully understood what good or bad can come from the new patch that Gavin has proposed for Bitcoin v 0.8.2.
I wish the foundation would have taken time to explain to the community. They didnt, so lets do some fact finding ourselves. Lets gather Pro and Contra arguments for or against the newly proposed 54.3 uBTC tx fee.

Pls discuss if this change should be implemented or not in other threads to keep it clean!

[Ichthyo]

I think many people here (including me) have not fully understood what good or bad can come from the new patch that Gavin has proposed for Bitcoin v 0.8.

Lets gather Pro and Contra arguments for or against the newly proposed 54.3 uBTC tx fee.

PRO: it is the first step of a plan to fight "transaction dust".
Tiny un-spendable transaction outputs can never be pruned from the Blockchain. Thus they will become the greatest problem after the first round of improving scalability. Thus this patch starts to introduce measures to penalise any transaction which adds such a tiny "dust" output.

This patch is a first step, and replaces one hard coded limit by another, more systematically one.
The next steps the developers seem to plan are: to determine this limit automatically, based on observing the transactions which are successfully accepted into the blockchain. This second step is unfortunately way more expensive to implement.