I try to pay the equiv of around $10 per transaction in fees.
and I pay currently 0.01 BTC as a fee since that was worth it for the service I get.
Wait, what? Did you suddenly get more generous in the last few days?
Note that I said 'try to'. The last time I had occasion to move BTC around was when I was selling, and that was when BTC was flittering around 4 figures. If/when I sell again, I'll probably adjust the transaction fee.
The 'open to all' is EXACTLY the reason I feel as I do. I am very confident that if bitcoin bloats under the incorrect notion that 'open to all' means 'open to all for free' rather than 'open to all who are willing to support it' it will NOT be 'open to all' by any stretch.
Every single time it comes back to paranoia about free transactions. I don't care if free transactions get shoved off onto a third party payment network, but if a fee is paid, even an average one, the purpose of that fee is for a miner to confirm the transaction and secure it directly on the blockchain. Not to shove it off to some third party. Not to guess what fee you need to pay to make it in to the next block. Not to wait if you guess wrong. Not to provide a shitty service for the average user. Not to turn the forum into a massive clusterfuck of "Bitcoin is slow and expensive" (the opposite of what it is now). That's what you'll get if you try to run the network constantly with full blocks. If people keep suggesting that a fee market alone suddenly makes bitcoin scalable, they're simply deluded. Taking that route just means we'll be having this argument again later and it'll be much easier next time around when it's proven beyond all doubt you're wrong.
I'm not saying let's have an unlimited system and free shit for all. I don't think anyone is saying that. I'm saying let's have a realistic blocksize that reaches a fair compromise between security and capacity.
Hint: that compromise sure as hell isn't as small as possible to make a few early adopters wealthy and screw everyone else over.
Bitcoin is a batch system. It never was suitable as an exchange currency for buying trinkets and that is why it is not successful here. Attempts to shut our eyes to this realitiy and kludge around it only add problems.
'slow and expensive' means vastly different things to different people. To me it means rock hardness and robustness against attack and that is exactly what I am looking for. It also means something which is a suitable foundation upon which to design and build solutions which actually are good for a wide variety of uses including those which are 'fast and cheap.' Again, I look forward to such solutions for my own use and for other people of all walks to reap some of the benefits of crypto-currency solutions.
Lastly, I expect that I would become more reliably more rich if XT took over and Google, Facebook, and friends had their way with it. I've already taken some profits so I'm even more inclined to try to achieve with Bitcoin it's true potential as something unique and worth a shit for humanity. The only thing which gives me pause is that Bitcoin might be detracting from work on something better. I'm still at the point where I think Bitcoin is the best bet, but not by much.
