Are we at the point where we HAVE to pay tx fee?

[wolciph]

What would happen if someone spammed the network with millions of transactions?

Reminds me of a similar question I'm mesmerizing about:

Who sets the price of transactions? The network or the miners?

If it's the miner, could an entity set up a massive supercomputer, mine most blocks and then set the transaction fees to 99%?

The prices are not set, they are "decided" by the market composed of miners and people who need the miners to make their transactions. There is a limit of one MB of transaction data per block which has been arbitrarily decided for now. It may be increased or not in the future.
At least that is what I understood.

For the time being, if you go on blockexplorer.com, you will see that blocks don't often exceed 5KB. So there should be 995KB of transactions more still possible per 10 minutes. Hence, I have no idea why there are so many pending transactions. Maybe they are invalid?

[theymos]

Only 27kB of free transactions will be included by miners using the official client (only 4kB for low-priority transactions). Individual miners can change this policy (by changing the code). It would be valid for miners to fill the entire 1 MB with free transactions.

The point of this is to prevent the block size from growing too fast from transaction spam. It might be increased once client mode is implemented and the size of the block chain doesn't matter as much.

[hippich]

thank you. now this makes more sense =) So... we are at the point where we need to have higher divisibility of coins to make sure we can send 0.01 without paying 0.01 in fees.

[error]

thank you. now this makes more sense =) So... we are at the point where we need to have higher divisibility of coins to make sure we can send 0.01 without paying 0.01 in fees.

It's my opinion that we passed this point some time ago.

[Meni Rosenfeld]

Also, since the entire block chain must be downloaded to a local machine before that machine can acquire a bitcoin address and utilize a wallet, it seems that some sort of "practical maximum" of the block chain should be defined, or at least thought about.
...
What am I missing here?

Lightweight clients can utilize a wallet without having the block chain.

If it's the miner, could an entity set up a massive supercomputer, mine most blocks and then set the transaction fees to 99%?

Yes. Note that they won't make it 99% because then people will stop using Bitcoin, their price will collapse and the miner will not have any revenues.
This has been discussed before, and IMO it is a vulnerability that will need to be patched.
(But as others said the miner doesn't "set" the fee, they just exclude all transaction that don't give the fee they want.)

[FreeMoney]

What would happen if someone spammed the network with millions of transactions?

Reminds me of a similar question I'm mesmerizing about:

Who sets the price of transactions? The network or the miners?

If it's the miner, could an entity set up a massive supercomputer, mine most blocks and then set the transaction fees to 99%?

When you send a tx you can add a fee, it's in the options on the newest version. Miners can then put the tx in a block and take the fee, or not, up to them.

[hippich]

Just to let everybody know - after roughly 24 hours transaction is still unconfirmed =)

http://bitcoincharts.com/bitcoin/ - 1Hu65a4f13rWcK8fs2hmwq9FPEXQ6ZYBnu

BTW, can someone explain in layman words where from priority is defined?

[caveden]

This raises the importance of a resend feature.

[Gavin Andresen]

BTW, can someone explain in layman words where from priority is defined?

Priority is a function of how many bitcoins are involved in the transaction (more is higher priority), the size (in bytes) of the transaction (smaller is higher priority), and the age of the transaction's previous transactions (older is higher priority).

Your transaction is taking a long time because it involved only 0.14 BTC which you got from a transaction that happened earlier today.  If you were running bitcoin version 0.3.21, it would have required that you add a 0.01BTC fee to send it.

[Jaime Frontero]

seems to me that the way it's set up now makes perfect sense.

the network has to stay strong - which means it must grow.  moore's law will take care of the hardware.

...and the eventual point will be to mine for transaction fees.  no?

[mp420]

The minimum transaction fee of 0.01 BTC does feel a tad high at the current exchange rates, though. I think fees should be more commonplace and the minimum fee should be smaller. I'd be happy to pay a 0.001 BTC fee to get my transaction processed quicker, but 0.01 is a lot of money.

[BitterTea]

It depends... since the size of the transaction isn't directly related to the amount transferred, the required fee can be quite small. Consider a 100 or 1000 BTC tx that has few inputs and will be accepted with a .01 BTC fee. That's only 0.01% or 0.001% fee, not too shabby.

[error]

It depends... since the size of the transaction isn't directly related to the amount transferred, the required fee can be quite small. Consider a 100 or 1000 BTC tx that has few inputs and will be accepted with a .01 BTC fee. That's only 0.01% or 0.001% fee, not too shabby.

At the moment, the transactions being queued for lack of fees ARE the ones with small amounts.