When will the "flexible fee" version be released?

[Tacticat]

I've been looking at Github but I couldn't find an answer to my question: When will the standard bitcoin client include flexible fees?

I know it's supposed to be included in the next major version (probably 0.9), but when is that version supposed to be released?

Finally, will 0.8.6 bring a decrease in transaction fees?

Thanks!

[readerbtc]

I understood 0.9 will bring a new fancy complex formula for calculating fees, I wouldn't call it "flexible". To me "flexible" sounds like you can change it after submitting.

I read about it here: https://bitcoinfoundation.org/blog/?p=290

[Mike Hearn]

There is a proposal to drop fees in 0.8.6, but it seems it won't be accepted.

There's still quite a bit of work to do on the flexible/smartfee system. We're still discussing how fees and the payment protocol will interact, so I am doubting 0.9 will go into beta testing before say end of January or early February, at best? Hard to know though. Also smartfees is currently suggesting a much higher fee than the current min fee, so actually if it was switched on right now fees would go up a lot, not down.

However it looks likely that the default "soft" block size limit will go up in 0.8.6 to ~750kb. The "true" block size limit is lower than that because of variance: we can't actually max out 750kb every 10 minutes because blocks aren't spaced out evenly, but the new limit should hopefully make average confirmation times more predictable given current load on the network (assuming miners follow the suggested change).