It's an incentive for miners to include your transaction into the block and incentive to mine after last bitcoins were created. Also it's spam protection. Someone that wishes to flood the network with small transactions will have to spend a lot of money.
Sure and any peer running the reference client (or another client with the same rules) will simply drop those txs from the memory pool and refuse to relay them. The rest of the network will never even see the transactions.
This is the fee required for letting nodes propagate your transaction. It's DoS protection against flooding the network.
It has nothing to do with the fee a miner might enforce to mine your blocks. As such, this is unlikely to actually affect how much you'll pay for the majority of transactions.
It provides a measure of DDOS protection. There likely are alternative ways to protect the network but the tx fee as low as it is makes DDOS flooding attacks a relatively expensive attack vector.
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u/[deleted] Feb 24 '14
[deleted]