Fees are optional and can be set to any level.
Transaction priority is partly based on age, so your "old" spam trumps any "new" transaction with the same fee or less.
Do you propose changing that?
Instead of cursing the darkness how about lighting a candle by telling us what you believe needs fixing and how you believe it should be fixed. The best way to do that would be to put your ideas on a webpage somewhere and post the link here. 95% of this board will just troll but the people who matter will judge your ideas on their merits.
Well, in my opinion there are several steps that would be key improvements:
- Create a chained trust system, this would allow a transaction to be verified by a logarithmically smaller number of clients; the key observation here is that to prevent double spending you do not need a majority of machines to vote, you only need a quorum of trusted machines; to understand this note that there are the so-called "5 degrees of separation" meaning that you "know" everybody in the world friend of a friend of a friend, etc. If each client has a "reputation" with its neighboring clients, you can create a web of trust such that a transaction can be verified with only a hundred or so votes, instead of the thousands (or millions?) now necessary. Also, these votes will tend to happen on the fastest machines, thus further speeding the process.
- Generate new bitcoins proportionally to the volume of transactions and distribute the new coins proportionately to existing holders of bitcoins; the whole mining thing is pointless and destabilizing.
- Base transaction priority on reputation, not age/size the way it is now. This will speed transactions being done by the largest, most trusted players and push out DOS transactions in a way far more effective and secure than the current system which can be gamed in all sorts of ways.
I would note that a web of trust is also critical to protecting the network against a motivated minority from taking over the system. In the current system, its one machine, one vote. This ill-conceived design has the result that a small group of professionals using large botnets could outvote the network or a big enough sub-network such that they could seize or create coins. As the value of bitcoins grows the feasibility of this kind of attack is increasing. In a reputation system, not all machines have the same vote, but more trusted machines have greater weight, this prevents the possibility of a zombie attack.
