a free market is where individual businesses can choose what fee's to charge
but having it hard coded into the protocol. is not freemarket as its affects everyone.
There are no fees hardcoded in the protocol.
ok softcoded (seeing as the software gets updated) EG version 0.1-0.8 came up with a box that demanded a fee, and would not let you transact without a fee
in a true freemarket the bitcoin QT should not be asking for fee's, the bitcoin QT should notcare if its 5ksat or 1million bitcoin that is sent.
bitcoin has too many "features" now that is limiting how people transact
EG imagine a bank account which you want your family to send money to each birthday/christmas or your employer paying you a wage each month, your bank now as a default setting wants to change your bank account number for each transaction received. (sarcasticly thanking LukeJr for that idea)
and now you have hundreds of accounts all with one line in the bank statement..
translation: the wallet.dat growing with each transaction. requiring regular backup and having to input many privkeys into different client apps if you prefer paper backup.
its simply making bitcoins less easy to use and manage for average joe.
i would rather have 1 address being repeatably used as default
where my tx is
vin:1address
vout:1otheraddress
amount:1btc
instead of having to list loads of addresses as the funds are spread. causing the message asking for a fee due to data size..
but it seems a few people are narrow sighted using the vision of miners. and not average joe
expecting certain standard replies
1) if you reply, that the fee only appears if a TX exceeds certain data size, then your simply agreeing that there was some code that was demanding fee's.
2) if you reply fresh addresses are more secure. i think you already argued days ago that 10^160 is strong enough security
3) mintxfee is a voluntary amount over the current rules of datasize.