Quote from: realnowhereman on May 19, 2012, 10:30:56 AM

Quote from: elggawf on May 19, 2012, 08:14:54 AM

Well you can say "really really low fees", "less than a penny fees", "statistically insignificant fees", but absolutely none of those are the same as "no fees", which is what a lot of Bitcoiners are parroting around, and it is wrong.

For any non-trivial amount; miners will include the transaction with no fee.

Some miners will accept any transaction at all (although I forget which pool it is). So it's not wrong at all (it just might take a looooong time to get that small transaction into a block).

It might be wrong one day; but it's not now -- so what's the problem?

Well, you can't advertise "no fees" and "faster than traditional banking" at the same time. You might not have been around, but there have been times at which no-fee transactions where piling up for multiple days (in the hundreds) and no miner was including them because the space reserved by the vanilla satoshi client (back then everyone just used that) was not big enough for the non-fee transactions being inserted by an attacker (if I recall correctly).

It's not much of a payment system if you can't expect your transactions to go through at some point. Without a fee, you can't, so I agree with previous poster that saying bitcoin transactions "are free" is false.

In my mind the much more compelling reasons for using bitcoin is its properties as a money, not as a payment system anyway Wink

Hey OP, did you talk about the kids about fractional reserve banking or touch that at all?