On 23/06/11 10:18, Alec Conroy wrote:
On Bitcoin-- we (and the web in general) desperately
need a
zero-overhead micropayment system of some kind. I can't help but
think our fundraising efforts would be helped if people would able to,
on impulse and without premeditation, donate $1 to WMF in thanks for
particular articles and have the full $1 actually get sent, without
transactions fees.
You need a massive distributed GPU processing cluster to verify
bitcoin transactions. Because massive computing clusters are not free,
the bitcoin protocol includes the ability to pay a transaction fee to
the cluster that verifies the transaction.
If bitcoin is still in use after the minting reward dries up, we will
have a situation where ever larger pools of GPUs will compete for
tranasction fees.
So I don't think it can be called "zero-overhead".
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction_fee
-- Tim Starling