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Why do you assume that?
A pool operator will have hardware capable of validating X transactions per second. Right now, with low transaction volume, X is much bigger than current transaction volume, no matter what kind of hardware the pool operator is using.
If we assume Bitcoin is successful, eventually the number of transactions to be processed will be bigger than X.
The pool operator will have an incentive to sort transactions by the fee minus how expensive they are to process, and drop transactions that cost too much. (or maybe implement some more complicated strategy like Mike's assurance contracts-- I have no idea how it will evolve).
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Miners have an incentive to lie about transaction fees to clients-- they want higher fees, so even though they might accept 0.001BTC for a transaction they might tell clients that the fee is 0.005BTC.
Clients should be able to get a pretty good idea of what transaction fees are needed (if any) to get a transaction into the block chain just by watching 'tx' and 'block' messages and seeing what miners are actually doing, instead of trusting miners to tell the truth about what they are doing.