[rallison]

1. This is something that has come up in discussion a fair amount, as the blockchain is already GBs in size and takes a fair amount of time to even sync with peers to download it all. There are a number of proposals for "thin" clients that will hopefully address this:

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Thin_Client_Security

2. I'm not sure what you are asking here. Transactions are almost always fractional as is - you can send as little as 0.00000001BTC at a time. I think I am missing what you are asking.

[fernly]

In the article is the example of paying somebody 0.15 of a bitcoin with the input of 0.20 and two outputs, 0.15 to the payee and 0.05 back to oneself. I am picturing having my wallet cluttered with lots of such little fractional bits, the "change" from transactions. How to tidy up? But maybe the answer is, next time I want to pay somebody 0.10 I just give them two my 0.05 "nickel" pieces... Well, I said it was a dumb question...

[diminoten]

If you want to, you could create a transaction that lets you spend all of those "loose change" transactions into a bigger transaction.

You have to do this for assurance contracts [0], for example, where the transaction cannot have any change (a transaction back to yourself).

[0] - https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Contracts#Example_3:_Assurance_co...