Is there any way to decrease the fees in qt? Some seem excessive. I have no problem with fees but as btc price climbs it makes it tough to justify the default fees.
I can decrease the fee by clicking "Settings" then "Options". But I'm running 0.8.5. Don't know if this still works under the latest version?
Another reason why fees are important is it keeps people from flooding the network with trivial transaction amounts. I read somewhere that a DOS attack could be attempted by sending huge numbers of tiny transactions. Transaction fees would make this very expensive to try.
Where did you read that?
Don't remember where I originally read about this, but a quick Google search turned up a reddit thread on exactly this topic:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1jvd7k/just_curious_would_it_be_possible_to_screw/OK, makes sense. Stops people spamming the blockchain as well.
But really, the whole system needs fees to function, otherwise who is going to pay for the infrastructure that keeps it going.
