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by geoka9 4572 days ago
But some clients (electrum, for example) refuse to send the transaction if you don't include a fee? There's also this:

A transaction may be safely sent without fees if these conditions are met:

    It is smaller than 10,000 bytes.
    All outputs are 0.01 BTC or larger.
    Its priority is large enough (see the Technical Info section below) 
Otherwise, the reference implementation will round up the transaction size to the next thousand bytes and add a fee of 0.1 mBTC (0.0001 BTC) per thousand byte.
1 comments

Sure, those are some client implementations, not all, people are free to interact with the network in all sorts of ways. Servers are also free to not include transactions that don't have enough fee for them.

I'm sure when the time comes something will be worked out, but it is most definitely voluntary rather than an enforced feature. Hell, do a quick google search for "Bitcoin no fees" and you'll find thousands of BTC supporters shouting about how it's so awesome as a payment method because there are no fees!