Quote from: satoshi on September 30, 2010, 06:11:56 PM

It ramps up the fee requirement as the block fills up:

<50K free
50K 0.01
250K 0.02
333K 0.03
375K 0.04
etc.

It's a typical pricing mechanism. After the first 50K sells out, the price is raised to 0.01. After 250K is sold, it goes up to 0.02. At some price, you can pretty much always get in if you're willing to outbid the other customers.

Just including the minimum 0.01 goes a long way.

So, in a Snowcrash future with Bitcoin as a major currency, generation of a block with 250K transactions would net the generating client a profit of 2K+ bitcoin, plus the regular award? Or is this total block size? Am I looking at this right? If there is ever a future that this transaction fee structure would be triggered by the transaction volume in a 10 minute span, then the Bitcoin economy would have to rival one of the top ten economies (defined by national borders) and that fee would be a fortune.

Is that fee structure ridgid, or can it be backed down as the value of bitcoin increases? I can conceive of a future wherein a ridgid fee of even .01 bitcoin could become a burden upon further growth. If the value of a bitcoin were to break parity with the Euro, such a fee structure could start to strangle the micropayments end of the economy. Granted, a sustained transaction rate of 300K every hour would still be a huge economy before such transaction fees came into play, making Paypal look like a small player.