<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_extra"><div class="gmail_quote"><div>I think this US/other cultural issue is complicating things more than we appreciate.</div><div><br></div><div>I am trying to imagine in my head how all this will work and what it will look like with allow_fee, and I just can't see it. Merchants want customers to pay the sticker price, deviance from that social norm is extremely rare even after the credit card company contracts that required it have been invalidated. The only time it happens to me is when buying flight tickets with credit cards: but it's only for that method, other payment methods are still treated as "free" a.k.a interior fees.</div>
<div><br></div><div>If you walk into a physical shop and try to pay a large bill with bags of pennies, the merchant won't enter into a complicated agreement where they agree to split the cost of processing with you. They will just reject the payment out of hand and tell you to get real. It has to be that way because otherwise the shop would carry the cost of counting all the pennies and hauling them around, not the buyer (who "knows" he put the right number of pennies in the bags).</div>
<div><br></div><div>As a buyer, I do not care about whether my transaction will confirm. If I try to pay with dust, there is no incentive for me to attach a higher fee than allow_fee to make that confirm, especially if the merchant has no way to reject the payment. What's more, as Jeremy points out, no clean fail mechanism means large piles of manual work and lots of disputes due to payments not clearing before the exchange rate shifts and other things like that. </div>
<div><br></div><div>Trying to make the success of payment confirmation a two-person dance seems to have so many edge cases it makes my head hurt. For most pay-to-merchant cases, it has to be the receivers job to get a transaction confirmed, and if the sender doesn't follow the instructions a payment should hard fail and require trying again. If Bitcoin-Qt can't handle that today, that does seem like a problem.</div>
<div><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);border-left-style:solid;padding-left:1ex">In the case of a transaction with too-low fee, either the payer can double-spend with a higher fee</blockquote>
<div><br></div><div>You can't do that. When a tx doesn't have the right fee attached you're out of luck today, except for the fact that some pools run with a custom child pays for parent patch. So respending it would bump priority for some miners and not others.</div>
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