Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Floating fees and SPV clients

From: Mike Hearn <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 3 Dec 2013 12:29:03 +0100

On Tue, Dec 3, 2013 at 12:07 PM, Gavin Andresen <[email-masked]>wrote:

> Making it fee-per-kilobyte is a bad idea, in my opinion; users don't care
> how many kilobytes their transactions are, and they will just be confused
> if they're paying for a 10mBTC burger and are asked to pay 10.00011 or
> 9.9994 because the merchant has no idea how many kilobytes the paying
> transaction will be.
>

Wouldn't the idea be that the user always sees 10mBTC no matter what, but
the receiver may receive less if the user decides to pay with a huge
transaction?

It may be acceptable that receivers don't always receive exactly what they
requested, at least for person-to-business transactions.  For
person-to-person transactions of course any fee at all is confusing because
you intuitively expect that if you send 1 mBTC, then 1 mBTC will arrive the
other end. I wonder if we'll end up in a world where buying things from
shops involves paying fees, and (more occasional?) person-to-person
transactions tend to be free and people just understand that the money
isn't going to be spendable for a while. Or alternatively that wallets let
you override the safeguards on spending unconfirmed coins when the user is
sure that they trust the sender.