Traditional payment methods grew us used to a system of fixed fees where the user had no vote to decide which amount he considered to be appropriate. This is not the case of Bitcoin, where the transaction fee can be enterily decided by the community and where the standard is set by consensus.
The problem? Right now people don't know that they, as a Bitcoin users, as a community, can have an impact on transaction fees.
For most people the default transaction fee is something that is decided by devolpers at a certain point of time. Actually, some clients such as Bitcoinspinner or the Reddit Bitcointip bot do not allow any type of decision whatsover. This is potentially bad, because bitcoin was designed as a system where transaction fees would be flexible and changed over time depending on the block size, amount of transactions and other "market situations".
Most users face the following decision: Either include a 0.0005 fee and have the transaction processed in a fast manner, or include no fee at all and risk having the confirmation delayed.They don't know that they could choose any other amount they consider to be fair. For example, given the recent increase in Bitcoin value I might think that an appropriate transaction fee should be 0.0001 and explicitly tell my client to send out this fee.
If everybody did this, if everybody would be aware that they can decide the amount they consider to be just, there would a market balance without need for developer intervention.
Miners would lower or increase the fees they accept by the decision of the community, because otherwise they wouldn't make a profit on these precious fees. Obviously, they have no incentive to accept 0 fee transactions, but if a majority now started using a lower 0.0001 fee, this would become the current standard.
Bitcoin users should know of the importance they hold in this issue. Bottom line: Bitcoin is not a traditional payment method, nor a traditional currency and as such this is an issue long overseen because there wasn't no need for it until now. But like many other things in the Bitcoin world, we must raise awareness about user-decided fees.
Post scriptum: This post is not intended to attack miners. I know that miners depend on these fees and someone might think that lowering would hurt them. But right now, the majority of a miner's profit still comes from block rewards and with the value of these rewards being 5 times higher than they were last december, there is no need to think that lower transaction fees adjusted by community decision would hurt them.
And even in the case that a fee is so low that miners don't like it, they too have a voice and vote by deciding which fees are included in their blocks and which not. Just like Bitcoin price is decided by the pressure of buyers and sellers, asks and bids, this is a similar mechanism.
What do you think? Oh! Please don't forget to say what fee (given the actual Bitcoin price) you deem appropriate.
What will you tell your client to set as default fee?
Cheers!
