Gavin has pointed out several times that micropayments aren't a core feature of bitcoin. And they can be achieved via off-chain transactions after all, maybe fee-free.
Ok I don't religiously follow everything he says so I didn't know.
Another thing that needs looking at is this rule here about when transaction fees are required:
"A transaction may be safely sent without fees if these conditions are met:
It is smaller than 10,000 bytes.
All outputs are 0.01 BTC or larger.
Its priority is large enough (see the Technical Info section below)
Transactions need to have a priority above 57,600,000 to avoid the enforced limit (as of client version 0.3.21). This threshold is written in the code as COIN * 144 / 250, suggesting that the threshold represents a one day old, 1 btc coin (144 is the expected number of blocks per day) and a transaction size of 250 bytes. "
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction_feesSo two things that need to be looked at. The rule of 0.01 output and the transaction priority value of 57 mill which is based on the idea of sending a single 1 day old bitcoin. With bitcoin exceeding $400 we can do a lot of significant transactions that will require fees if these hard limits are not addressed.
And don't say that this only applies to bitcoin-qt. All the miners are using bitcoin-qt so these rules apply to everyone.
but I think switching to mBTC and lowering the default fee are both good ideas.
