Some lucky miner out there just made 0.01 btc in the form of the transaction fee I just paid.
Don't pay them. Simple. Anyone dumb enough to pay transaction fees right now deserves to be scammed.
I never pay any transaction fee and it is all good. The BS about "paying transaction fee makes miner process faster" is total BS.
Got a block explorer link where you've sent somebody 0.02 or 0.01 without paying a fee? I'd be interested to see this. I'm on my laptop atm and my wallet on this computer is always empty, so I had a balance of 0.03... was going to send 0.02, why not send 0.01 as a fee. xD
Anyways, there -are- mining pools out there that will only process transactions with a certain fee attached, and as fees become a larger portion of profits made from mining(as the btc reward for blocks decreases), the minimum fee on pools will increase.