What's the minimum TX fee required to stop network Spam?

[Tacticat]

If we could avoid the network being spammed when the fee was at 0.5¢ why can't it be that way now?

I know that the minimum fee is there to avoid network spam, flooding and DOS attacks yet... how is that minimum fee calculated? Is it just some arbitrary number that developers agreed on or is there actually a way to calculate a reasonable minimum transaction fee?

Because everybody keeps saying: "They're going to lower the fee... they're going to lower the fee...". And I'm asking: When? Why not do something about it now?

Blocks are not nearly full and there is no reason for the transaction fee to be as high as it is now. We could stop a hardfork in a couple of hours but we can't agree on a new minimum fee in any reasonable amount of time?

Developers should make a statement and say which is a reasonable anti-spam fee to keep the network healthy. Miners and users could switch in just a couple of days.

[justusranvier]

When mining becomes more professionalized miners will start to develop their own proactive strategies for which transactions the choose to include in blocks and that kind of limit won't be needed.

Nodes can deal with spam on the network level by a rate-limiting algorithm the temporarily blocks peers that send out too many transactions.

[bg002h]

I'm gonna buy $20 million in ASIC hardware. If you want to be in my block, you better pony up...or be willing to wait a week or two

[mai77]

a fee of 0.00001 BTC would keep all those spammers at bay

[bg002h]

It would be nice if miners broadcast their hash power, transaction fee and maximum block size settings...it would be cool if clients could aggregate the info and present an estimate of time to confirmation vs transaction fee.

[deepceleron]

Considering that the blockchain is 85% spam from one site, the fee isn't doing a good enough job. Go to any of those money transfer places and ask how much it costs to wire money to your relatives in another country - the answer is a bit more than $0.04 USD.