Quote from: arachn1d on April 14, 2011, 11:34:51 AM

Quote from: Raulo on April 14, 2011, 08:37:56 AM

Quote from: Mahkul on April 13, 2011, 11:36:47 PM

This means that every time you make a transaction you give 0.01 to the person who finds the next block.

Small correction. The fee is 0.01 BTC per 1KB of transaction size rounded up. A transaction with one input and two outputs (most typical) is 0.25 KB and the fee is 0.01. If your transaction has many inputs (like consolidating a wallet with many small change coins), the fee will be proportionally higher.

There is still no need to pay the fee unless you want to be (almost) sure to have the transaction included in the next block. The fee will probably become important when there are much more transactions going on and the competition for inclusion into the blocks is higher.

Kind of sounds stupid if Bitcoin gets really busy that you have to "pay fees" to make sure your transactions go by faster. This is a silly gimmick to the whole idea of Bitcoin doesn't make sense.

It's really not silly. Finding blocks requires hardware and energy. Right now the payment for that is mostly new coins. Eventually there won't be any new coins. There will be a smooth transition to fees only over the next 120 years. It's clever because it solves two problems at once, appropriate distribution of new coins and free/cheap transactions for a long time. Maybe cheap forever compared to alternatives.