Hi guys.

I think the Bitcoin protocol should be capable to handle micropayments, say from ~1 mBTC on without fee. This would allow tipping much easily. However, the current BTC fee in the protocol is set to 1 mBTC for transactions smaller than 0.01 BTC. Can anyone enlighten me, why the fee threshold is set so high? Are the spammers really an issue?

Also, by reading the bitcoin developer guide, do we really need such a complicated concept for micropayments:
https://bitcoin.org/en/developer-guide#micropayment-channel