54.3 uBTC are the new Satoshi. Says the devs. What is next..... Link the fees to $0.01 and let the foundation pick the exchange rates for us?

So basically we can't say "there are plenty of liquidity! BTC are divideable to 8 decimal places!" anymore. Says the devs. Thank you for fornicating without creating a fork.

Your ignorance is showing. Will you be apologetic when you realize that you look foolish here? Sadly, I expect not.

If I apologized for the ignorance would you get off your high heels and point the ignorance out?

Thank you very much. I would be doing some reading.

Not to mention the bitcoin fountains that have been spamming essentially unspendable 0.00001 btc outputs...

Also, doesn't  this kill coloured coins?  They would require a separate relay network.

Ideally, the relay rule should be based purely on tx fee paid.

Ideally, people would pay for the costs they impose.  At the moment, the 2 costs are UTXO set size and storage in the blockchain.

These aren't actually miner costs.  With a maximum block size, they would inherently charge per MB, but that isn't because MBs cost them.  It is an artificial market to encourage mining.  The actual cost of mining large blocks falls on the network as a whole (miners and verification nodes alike).

For people who are willing to trust that all blocks more than X deep are secure, then all they need to store on their hard drive is the UTXO set.

I would suggest that as long as a transaction has a large enough transaction fee per kb and has at least as many inputs as it has outputs, it should be relayed.  This transaction will either shrink the UTXO set or keep it the same.

Coinbase transactions that have more than 1 output could be penalized, if it is critical to keep the UTXO set low.  Maybe they are only relayed/count if they meet 0.9 times the standard threshold.

The changes make sense. Right now Bitcoin has a large variety of what we call "magic numbers". They're just arbitrary choices that may have made sense at some point but aren't guaranteed to make sense in future. For the case of fees, Gavin's change is the first step towards removing these magic numbers and making them more dynamic.

Because the work is complex this change is only the first of several. It reduces the fee charged from the current level to reflect the higher exchange rate, and tweaks some other rules to be more internally consistent.

Eventually the goal is to have no hard-coded magic fee levels at all, so manual adjustments to reflect big exchange rate swings aren't needed any more. But we're not there yet.

You've got yourself a deal!   The base fee that this is set based on is configurable in bitcoin.conf, just as you were demanding.  The option won't be promoted at least initially because its relatively important that the network have roughly consistent settings (or transactions will get stuck when they get poor propagation due to being right on the boundary) and changing it on your own system won't change miners or your peers, but it's absolutely settable in order to avoid forcing everyone to update (or recompile) should people start selling cars for 1 BTC.