I'm not sure about when bitcoin first came out, but the minimum fee was 0.01 back when bitcoins went for around $0.10.
I also think a 0.01 fee for litecoin would be better than 0.1. Are you going to open up a thread on liteco.in to discuss this?
Yes, from what I can tell the Bitcoin fees were always around 1/10 of a cent. Anything less and it will make it cheap for an attacker to spam the network. So that's why I decided on 0.1 LTC for the fee. Anything less and the attacker will just keep on spamming. Could I have started a poll and asked people for what they wanted? Sure, but do you know what the vote would look like? Everyone would vote for very very low fees b/c no one wants to pay any fee. But people don't understand why we need a fee right now. So I actually have to make a decision to set a fee higher than what people wanted because I have to weigh the importance of using the fee to deter an attack with people's desire to have no fee.
So yes, I made a decision that I thought was best for Litecoin. I felt like I had to act quickly before the transaction spam gets too out of control. And getting everyone to understand why we needed a 0.1 LTC fee would have been an impossible task. Look how many posts I had to make on this subject, and still, most people don't even understand that the fee is not a static fee that's applied to every transaction. So if people want to keep on discussing this topic, please read this wiki page and try to understand why we need a fee for low priority transactions: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction_fees
In the future, as ltc price goes up, I will reduce the fee to keep it at about $.001. I don't think we need to have a poll or a long discussion whenever I decide to lower the fees, right? Or do we? If people really cared, I will.
We can discuss to see if there are better solutions. I thought of tying the fee to the current difficulty, which is loosely correlated with the price. That way we don't have to constantly change the fee and we will let the market determine the fee. Gavin had ideas about letting miners set the fee somehow. But I'm sure a lot of people won't be happy about that solution. But all this will take a while to flesh out and implement. In the meantime, I made the fee structure effectively equivalent to Bitcoin. And I was surprised to see so much complaining on the forums.
I'm shocked to read that... I really don't know what to say.