Ok,
I just noticed there is a minimum transaction fee of 0.0005 in the bitcoin 0.5 client.
I wanted to send 0.00000001 to myself as a test to see if it really works, and to have fun on the monitor and block explorer or something !
=D
So I ended up paying much more to other guys then myself !
=D
So my question is basically:
Is this minimum transaction fee really required for bitcoin ? or is it possible to send small values without paying transaction fees ? Maybe by using a different client ?!?
This might have implications for the future when BitCoins become worth 1.000.000 dollars !
0.0005 of a million dollars = 500 dollars !
I think 500 dollars is a bit too much to pay for a transaction fee !
Also the ammount I ended up sending to myself would have been only:
0.00000001 of a million dollars which would be: 0.01 dollar ( 1 dollar cent ) !
So I just ended up paying 500 dollars to transfer 0.01 dollar ( 1 dollar cent ) !
Well in the future with the current client system I can forget about micro payments and transactions ! At least with bitcoin 0.5 ?!
It will be interesting to see how people react to such ridicilous high fees !
Possible conclusion: Maybe micro-transactions are a pipe-dream !
Because the ammount of harddisk space to store the transaction costs more than the transaction is worth itself, except for the fee, but nobody is going to pay a high fee like that.
And there is also an unfairness in this system, only the miners get a share of the fee. All other clients which store the data on their harddisks get nothing !
So perhaps there should be a "storage fee" as well. Which would then go to all clients storing data on their drives !
Except there could be a problem with it, because this would cause even more micro-transactions, unless there is some easy way to make "mass-micro-payments-to-select-groups-of-people/acounts".
Perhaps some kind of "bitset transaction", where each bit represents an account. Perhaps this could be a bit pattern in a tree, with the leaves of the tree being active clients at the moment of transaction and/or storage.
Or perhaps each client which passes on the transaction to somebody else, can remove the previous client from the transaction, and add himself to the transaction, but then there is a problem of different storage/archives/history, but perhaps there could be a way to allow that, or perhaps not. As long as perhaps something remains the same or so, perhaps a hash collision for a simple hash algorithm, which the storage provided must use. Then again if it's too easy perhaps others can then go back in time and fake it too easy, but then again maybe not because of the block. Well whatever.
I think it's clear that there must also be some "storage fee and incentive" otherwise this gonna suck long term, with crazy micro transactions, which actually cost more to store then they are worth, which would be weird, and be a burden on the storage providers.
Perhaps storage providers should "register" themselfes among a p2p network, to get an easy/small bit pattern assigned to them, which can then be used somehow or so.
This leaves bandwidth fees, which might also be considered... perhaps I should read that document of microsoft a bit closer, I already scanned it a little bit, but it does sound kinda complex.
Oh well...
I look forward to seeing my micro transaction arrive !
=D
Also the bitcoin monitor does show that it's still somehow possible to do transactions without fees ?!? Or perhaps I miss-understood !
