As I mentioned, there are tons of transactions you already cannot easily make. For example, you currently can't easily send 1e-8 to someone without including a fee which is 50,000 times larger than the amount you are sending. You cannot easily make a payment which requires 2 keys out of 20 to redeem.  You cannot easily make a payment that adds 5 kilobytes of extra "message" data in a transaction. You cannot easily send a txout with value 0 zero to someone... etc. All of these things are non-standard transactions.  The protocol rules permit them, so miners can add them— but you have to find a miner willing to modify their software to do it.  Whats new here is an additional kind "you can't easily use a transaction which creates txouts which are small relative to the amount miners treat as zero", which can be freely overridden by miners changing that amount.

cough cough just get rid of satoshi dice cough cough

Yes, assuming you mean "with a single input of value 3.000005"* that is the current (since 0.3.19?) behavior.

*(if instead your wallet had, say two inputs of respective values 3 and .000005 it would just use the first exactly)

You, sir, have the patience of a saint.

This is about changing the fundamentals of bitcoin. Transactions should not be limited..... PERIOD.  This goes against everything bitcoin has said it stood for.

To understand what gmaxwell said, I find this explanation of fees helpful.

I think you guys are missing the point here.

The tx fee structure we currently use, plain sucks. It's been revised a couple of times as the BTC price rose over the years. These dust tx's cost more to spend than they are worth, they're essentially useless right now.

Once BTC price rises enough we will of course remove this patch and revise the tx fee rules to allow these transactions to be spent.

You can't use them right now. Try spending a 1satoshi input, you'll need to pay a 0.0005BTC tx fee to send it.

Don't even need to— it's set based on the fee value that gets treated as zero for priority purposes. So presumably miners will lower that amount (no recompile is required) if the value of Bitcoin increases, so even absent new versions with revised defaults we're not stuck with it entirely.

The earlier versions of the software in the days of Satoshi only used two digits, in fact.

And you still are, its no problem to remove the patch, but the actual purpose of the patch is to make SatoshiDice stop filling the blockchain with dust (I'm going to come right out and say it).