two questions for the experts

[willphase]

1.  I generated a transaction with a 0 transaction fee and pushed that into the network - it hasn't been included in any solved blocks yet.  Will it ever be included?  Is there a way of sending it directly to a set of nodes (e.g. free transaction relay) so it might stand more of a chance of being included in a block? It was only 0.01BTC so it's more for academic interest than anything real

2.  If I run the bitcoin client and do not set it to generate i.e. it's not trying to solve blocks, then am I helping verify transactions?  My understanding was that I wasn't helping because blocks are only verified when the correct hash is guessed.  Am I right that all I am doing is serving as a relay for the p2p messages?  Only asking because people are saying you need to run bitcoin clients to keep the network working, but I thought that as long as pools are mining and including transactions in the solved blocks, the network can be fully 'kept alive' by pools just as well as lots of people running the official bitcoin client on their desktop.

Will

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[Garrett Burgwardt]

1. Give it time. It'll get into a block sooner or later - probably sooner

2. You pass along and verify txs, as I recall. Frontline filters, keeping most of the cruft from the miners.

[willphase]

1. Give it time. It'll get into a block sooner or later - probably sooner

okay cool   I crafted the transaction manually with 0 fee (which isn't possible with the bitcoin client afaik) so I wasn't sure if it would ever be accepted.

2. You pass along and verify txs, as I recall. Frontline filters, keeping most of the cruft from the miners.

Okay, so you're stopping a flood of the network with invalid transactions, but you're not actually speeding up the rate at which any transaction might be placed into a valid block?  This is kind of what I thought.

Will

[error]

Check the list of outstanding transactions and see if it's present. If it is, then it will be included in a block eventually.