I asked the following downthread but I'm afraid its going to get buried in the muck:
"Zero Transaction Fees"???
Are you refunding the bitcoin transaction fees that are builtin to the protocol[1]? If you are going to eat that cost you should say so, it seems like a good marketing point.
So we aren't including any bitcoin transaction fees by default. If you try to send a transaction below 0.01 it will never get confirmed without the fee, so we added this user interface improvement a few days ago which gives the option of including the fee if people want to:
Coinbase will make money more like an exchange down the road, 0.5% to convert money into our out of bitcoin, but once you have your money in bitcoin there are no transaction fees (it mentions this on the homepage, but admittedly it's still a bit confusing). I wish there was a better way to distinguish between an exchange fee and transaction fee (to the average consumer these may be the same thing, I'm not sure).
In general, I would like to abstract out the idea of btc fees to the average user (I think it's an unnecessary complication for someone new to bitcoin). It would be much easier to just say "no fees" - this is simple and shows a clear benefit of using bitcoin. If you have to explain to people that "sometimes there are fees, but they are a lot lower, etc" it loses some of it's punch. Right now we can do zero fees and transactions still get confirmed. In the future we may be able to do it by eating the cost and have this be a cost of doing business, but that is a decision for later.
