As a webmaster, I wish to humbly beg the community...

[djproject]

...please, PLEASE ditch the mandatory transaction fees.  I want to start accepting microtransactions (like ~.01BTC or even much smaller) and this is impractical with a .01 mandatory transaction fee.  And I can hardly ask my users to go download a different client than the "main" client from the frontpage of bitcoin.org!

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[Maged]

They are being reduced to .0005 BTC in 0.3.23, and will be reduced to .0001 in the version after that.

[hawk196]

I'm curious, why do we even have transaction fees in the main client?

[Maged]

I'm curious, why do we even have transaction fees in the main client?

We want people to get used to it so that there won't be any issues once no new coins are created. Also, it prevents spam.

[djproject]

The current setup, with a scary popup notice and, really, a very hefty fee, is really going overboard if it's just meant to "get people used" to an event which will happen many years from now.  The setup in the previous client, with an optional fee input box and a note about priority below it, was very good.  I really liked that, it reflected well on the currency   I hope to see that return...

By the way, even reducing it to .0001 is something of a bandaid fix.  A key virtue of bitcoins is the ability to do micro-transactions.  Personally, and I think I speak for many other webmasters, I'm quite willing to "risk it" a bit and accept micro-payments with low priority and it takes awhile for confirmations to come in.  People could cheat me, in theory (it would be a lot of work, to save pennies...) but statistically most customers won't do that.

Other P2P networks like bittorrent do not have anything like transaction fees.

Finally, as for spamming, I propose that instead of mandatory fees, we simply make the client refuse to send out more than X transactions per minute.

Thanks for all the hard work, BTW, I realized I was coming across as rather critical, I do appreciate all the effort you guys are doing for bitcoin.  I wish I could contribute myself but I only program in C.

[hens]

Finally, as for spamming, I propose that instead of mandatory fees, we simply make the client refuse to send out more than X transactions per minute.

I don't think that'll work. If someone is spamming, then they'd be using their own custom made client anyway. Spammers can be quite sophisticated - there is money in it after all.

[djproject]

Finally, as for spamming, I propose that instead of mandatory fees, we simply make the client refuse to send out more than X transactions per minute.

I don't think that'll work. If someone is spamming, then they'd be using their own custom made client anyway. Spammers can be quite sophisticated - there is money in it after all.

You are absolutely correct  .  By the exact same token, they can use their own custom client to get around the mandatory transaction fee.  What you independently discovered (and which I posted in another thread earlier) is:  anti-spamming measures on the client side cannot dissuade a determined attacker anyway.  That goes for whether it's a transitions-per-minute limit or whether it's a mandatory fee.  In short: only legitimate users are punished.

My transactions-per-minute proposal was meant to replace one ineffective spam guard with another ineffective spam guard (with fewer additional drawbacks).