Altough there is a consensus on a decent amount of fee, you can always choose how much you want to pay.
No big deal.
I disagree on this. If you choose to pay a too low of an amount then you are unlikely to have your tx treated as if it includes a fee, and if your tx otherwise is too low of a priority then it will likely take a long time for it to get confirmed.No big deal.
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As far as I know the fees have been reduced once, who's saying that it can't be done again?
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As far as I know the fees have been reduced once, who's saying that it can't be done again?
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Actually, it has already happened at least 3 times in the past.
I recall the standard transaction fee being 0.001 BTC, then I recal it being reduced to 0.0005 BTC, then down to 0.0001 BTC, and eventually it was reduced to 0.00001 BTC.
I haven't loaded Bitcoin Core version 0.10 yet, but I thought I read that it now attempts to dynamically compute a reasonable fee. If the transaction has a high enough priority, you can send it with 0 fee and still have it confirmed in a reasonable amount of time.
It is ultimately up to the pool/miner/the entity that finds the block to determine the tx policy and what tx's they will accept among any number of factors including the size of the tx fee on a per kb basis. Although the miners as a whole may generally accept the same amount of a tx fee, it is impossible to "change" the tx fee.
When the price of bitcoin increases substantially from where it is now, in theory the number of tx per second will have increased substantially so the average tx fee can have decreased a lot and the miners would still get a similar total amount of total block reward.
