Quote from: BTConomist on May 27, 2013, 11:30:08 PM

Quote from: grue on May 27, 2013, 09:02:27 PM

satoshi said himself that bitcoins are not designed for micropayments. that role should be left to third party clearing houses.

Interesting... Do you remember where he had said that?

I can't seem to remember ever reading such assertion.

Here's the closest I could find with a quick search:

Quote from: satoshi on February 14, 2010, 06:28:03 AM

- snip -
A transaction is over the maximum size limit if it has to add up more than 500 of the largest payments you've received to make up the amount. A transaction over the size limit can still be sent if a small fee is added.

The average transaction, and anything up to 500 times bigger than average, is free.

It's only when you're sending a really huge transaction that the transaction fee ever comes into play, and even then it only works out to something like 0.002% of the amount. It's not money sucked out of the system, it just goes to other nodes. If you're sad about paying the fee, you could always turn the tables and run a node yourself and maybe someday rake in a 0.44 fee yourself.

Quote from: satoshi on August 11, 2010, 11:28:50 PM

It would be nice to keep the blk*.dat files small as long as we can.

The eventual solution will be to not care how big it gets.

But for now, while it's still small, it's nice to keep it small so new users can get going faster. When I eventually implement client-only mode, that won't matter much anymore.

There's more work to do on transaction fees. In the event of a flood, you would still be able to jump the queue and get your transactions into the next block by paying a 0.01 transaction fee. However, I haven't had time yet to add that option to the UI.

Scale or not, the test network will react in the same ways, but with much less wasted bandwidth and annoyance.

Emphasis added by me.