4
After reading this question I got interested in these mysterious spammers who sent satoshis randomly. For what I read, here's been plenty of discussion about this, mainly at Bitcoin talk (discussions here, here and here - in Spanish also here, here and here) but also somewhere else on the network (as in here).
I got sad when I saw I hadn't received such micro-payments, doubly sad when I read most of such transfers won't ever be included since most miner pools actively avoid collecting such "dust" - so spammer gets his message out for free, even though it may only last for a short while.
And I wondered - why not do include such dust, so that spammers are harmed economically and stop doing it? Plus, plenty of people would get tiny bits of money.
What would be the cons? Plus, if I've understood how Bitcoin operates correctly, spammers would end up paying much more in transaction fees than the amounts they actually send - which makes it doubly mysterious to me why not include them.
Good point! However, the downside of not including them is that after some days pass those transactions die - so from the network perspective it's as though they had never happened, in which case they can send yet another 100 million messages, and then some more... basically for free (since the cost of buying the initial Bitcoin is already a sunk cost) – Joe Pineda – 2014-02-13T13:16:57.223
2@JoePineda If this actually becomes a problem then most likely what will happen is more and more clients will stop forwarding transactions with less than 5430 satoshis in outputs. Accepting them is completely up to the miners, and they have no incentive to accept something that doesn't pay the fee. – placeybordeaux – 2014-02-13T18:00:06.980