[Foundation-l] EFF & Bitcoins

[Tim Starling]

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