so micro transactions at nearly no cost. is a flaw not a feature?
Near zero-cost txs = near zero-cost abuse.
When you have systems that are highly inefficient and thus vulnerable to abuse in order to achieve being trustless and decentralized, then you have to protect these systems from abuse through economic disincentives.
This is not only relative to bitcoin: Altcoins suffer the same fate. There is no alt that can have near-zero or zero fees and not have an open attack vector of abuse.
However, what is now problematic, may not be in the future as technology progresses.
From 1995 to 2015 we went 1000x in networks, storage, cpu etc. Till 2036 we could see a similar growth pattern of 100x-1000x-10.000x - who knows.
ask the miners getting paid these fees if they feel they are getting abused....
The political environment is weird and volatile right now. Every action could be used for flaming - either way an argument goes. For example:
If, say, devs make some changes that lead to increased fees "ohhh they want to exclude the small guy..."
If, say, devs make some changes that lead to fee reductions "ohhh they are fucking over the miners and the long-term security of the network"
If, say, miners process junk txs with near-zero fees, "ohhh they are including all the spam"
If, say, miners don't process junk txs, "we must take action to FORCE miners to mine txs, they can't just mine nearly empty blocks because they don't like the small fees paid"
the goal has always been to get so many TX that a tiny fee supports mining.
"spam" ( millions betting <1$ on dice games) will allow for me to play dice games at nearly no cost. so i like le spam
Long-term goal is for bitcoin to be able to handle every microtx.
Short-term, while hardware, network and software aren't up there yet, is to "manage" the situation, even by excluding small micro-txs as uneconomical to be processed. This is not something that "Core" started. It was started by Satoshi himself.
Bumping the blocksize up with current software, networks, storage, cpu etc etc, is hitting a wall after a few tens of txs per second - it doesn't work for a massive payment system, and definitely not for microtxs.
It needs much better networks/storage/processing power, or it needs much more efficient software (or a combination of both) to get there for microtxs.
In theory the network is agnostic whether you transfer 0.01 btc or 10 btc. But in the real world, when a bank or paypal charges you 20$ for a 300$ transfer, it's best if you take this through BTC - and you keep the 20$.
...and when you have, say, 30 txs per second in BTC as max capacity, you'd better be utilizing them to the best of your ability to maximize your savings versus the banking system, by saving serious money that would be paid in banking fees (10-20-100$ in traditional payment method fees) rather than wasting these 30 txs/sec with microtxs, dice, etc. Besides, there are altcoins that would be far cheaper for this type of use. When the system is able to do 300-3000-30.000 tx/s, then even microtxs will be quite viable.
