[AdmiralBeotch]

Transaction fees are optional.

Currently, if you do not include a transaction fee, your transaction will get confirmed, but the first confirmation could take longer for a miner to pick it up - but it is very likely to still get confirmed.

As transactions per second increase and load is placed on the memory pool, those fee-less transactions may get lost and need to be resubmitted.

[dfc]

"As of 10 June 2012, minimum transaction fees on the original Bitcoin client are:

Accept a transaction for inclusion in a block: 0.0005 BTC

Relay a transaction to other Bitcoin hosts: 0.0001 BTC

A transaction can be sent without fees if both of these conditions are met:

It is smaller than 10 (SI) kilobytes (10.000 bytes).

All outputs are 0.01 BTC or larger."[1]

Put another way as bitcoin grows fee-less transactions will become rare...

[1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction_fees

[rictic]

At the current exchange rate then any transaction below ~$0.06 might have a transaction fee of a fraction of a cent. Simple fix? Don't support incredibly small transactions, (or at least don't support large numbers of very small transactions).

[Assuming that point to point transactions that aren't doing complicated contract logic are always less than 10kB.]

[dfc]

I'm not trying to find fault in theoir business model; it was a genuine question...

[muyuu]

You don't need to use Gavin's client.

[dfc]

My political philosophy professor used to call this "making a rule out of the exception."

How many other viable bitcoin clients are there? And what do you think the likelihood of you fee-less transaction being accepted despite a flood of fee paying transactions?

[AdmiralBeotch]

the qt client, while being the baseline of measure, is a dinosaur. I use Electrum because it does not require the maintenance of a local blockchain, start up is immediate after long darkouts. It can be fully run off-line with no network connectivity. It supports aliases like email addresses instead if complicated bitcoin addresses. It uses deterministic key generation so I can literally backup my wallet in my head with a passphrase, erase my wallet, and recreate it from my mind. Oh yea, and it allows me to make transactions without any fees. Other worthwhile clients: Armory, Multibit. They are all viable and under rapid development.

Edit: electrum can be fully run offline as in you can monitor your balance without a network connection AND you can write transactions that can then be injected into the blockchain by a networked connection. But the electrum client at no time needs to be connected to the network.

Additionally, a networked computer can contain a deseeded wallet (no keys) for securely monitoring your off-line balances.