Gavin Andresen - 2011-05-16 22:44:06

Yes, the 0.3.21 release will charge a fee if you want to do things like send 0.05 bitcoins to yourself.

Why?  Because some people were sending 0.05 BTC to themselves over and over and over again, wasting everybody's disk space, bandwidth, and CPU time.  The fee is there to reveal the hidden costs of sending lots of tiny transactions.

Next release the normal fee will be dropped from 0.01 BTC to 0.0005 BTC.

The long-term goal is to figure out how to make fees dynamic; maybe in a few months you'll get a slider that lets you choose fees on a transaction-by-transaction basis, and will show you how long you're likely to wait for various amounts of fees...