Press accounts are now suggesting that ~30 BTC has been burned in these transactions. That is nearly $8,000 at current exchange rates. It is hard to believe that somebody would go through the effort and expense of sending random dust at this scale just to piss off the bitcoin community.
Nope, the 30 BTC isn't burned. They are just paid of as miner's fees, and increasing miner's revenues. Now so many blocks having a 0.2+ BTC fees. It is unusual in the past (as fees normally between 0-0.15BTC). Some blocks even contain a 0.5+ BTC fee. Those fees are from the spam txs, and from everyone paying extra fees because of the spam.Though the coins are lost to the spammer as long as he doesn't own a huge farm and can make at least a big portion back.
@Original Poster... the fees were mostly donated, as far as i know. And the reason is that there are many people that want to show that we need bigger blocks now because there are still some people that think bitcoin needs to become a high payment provider without small transactions. Wouldn't make much sense as a currency but that's their solution.
At the moment i doubt that there are still many that doubt the need of a blocksize increase.
