$.001 is so low it's not even worth talking about in terms of a globally visible transaction. Your bank won't let you transfer that amount. Why should bitcoin? You don't need to be able to transfer such amounts in order to have sub-1-cent microtransactions. You can have $.000001 cent microtransactions. You simply can't clear them in the global economy without batching them up... which people are used to doing already, because payment clearing services in gov currency have transaction charges that far exceed $.01.
Even if payment processing costs weren't an issue (which would cause many more small unbatched transactions in gov currency, similar to the crap being dumped into the block chain... banks have to log gov currency transactions for auditing purposes), whatever the cost of individual transactions, if you have a payor who owes you $.001 over a billing period, you've done something wrong. They'd be just as willing to pay you $.01 as $.001.
You should be able to send whatever value you want, as long as you pay a fee for the resources used.
Why should it take hours for my Bitcoin client to sync (and therefore for me to do anything with my Bitcoins) because people want to encode URLs in the blockchain?
In a few years, it could take days to sync a new client. What kind of banking system would that be?
Can't you submit transaction before it syncs as long as you you're confident the transaction will be valid? For a business, they could maintain a current sync and you submit your transmitting address to them and they can verify, that way your smartphone doesn't have to get bogged down with the task of anything other than signing the transaction.
If I recall, the standard Bitcoin client doesn't work until the blockchain is synced. I've had to wait an hour to do a transaction I wanted to do because I hadn't opened it in a few months.
Shh, economics. This is why people in developing (or not developing) regions will continue to use mobile phone minutes as a medium of exchange rather than adopting btc.
There are a number of effective "we're gonna change the world" platforms in the bitcoin world.
1) No centralized bank or government control of value/transactions/etc.
2) Anonymous wealth control
3) Microtransactions
4) Non-repudiable 'instant' transactions
These are not exclusive, nor a complete list. For example, I'm very much a fan of #3 and #4 because I have been hoping for years that we can create a sustainable system for implementing many of the commercial aspects, including transclusion, of the Xanadu goals.
All of us are ignorant or dismissive of some basic facts, whether technical, political, or economical. For example, people are very fascinated with identifying the high-net-worth btc holders. While the effort to track their accounts and transfers was originally non-trivial, people spent a lot of time developing tools and methods for correlating accumulation and distribution. It's a short hop from there to tying an account to human entities.
It's not that this was unforeseeable, but that the effort seemed too much to worry about. However, one should probably assume that any effort distributed across the Internet will attract the attention of those people who have the time and inclination to grind away at tasks considered to be pointless by the vast majority. For some, it's a way of counting coup, and you'll never escape that.
The 'opportunity' that the limitation on transaction size creates is a value-added service for micropayments. In effect, a merchant would keep a ledger of microtransactions that could be remitted at any time. You could do this today with Mt. Gox, for example.
The downside of this is much the same as with a conventional financial system. That is, people are morons and principles have a price. Many of the systems built to date have been compromised (Mt. Gox, Bitcoinica, etc.) or misappropriated completely (BTCST, Bitcoinica, etc.). It is unlikely (but possible) that an entity with technical and legal competence and a scrupled imperative will bridge the gap for microtransactions on a long-term basis.
If it were to happen, one would still have a centralized 'bank' that would have to follow practices that would compromise anonymity due to AML and KYC regulations because bitcoin services are not a competitive market at this time.
If you're making transactions smaller than 1 cent, keep them off the blockchain. You're just wasting everyone's resources. Aggregate them until they're big enough to matter and THEN commit them to the blockchain.
Yes, I see that they're adding command line flags. I don't really think BTC can be considered so stable at this point that a run up to $1000 and then a drop back down to the low hundreds within a day or two could be considered impossible. And if its value grows beyond even that the fluctuations may swing even wilder in terms of monetary value.
I'd also point out that in much of the world, the local equivalent of $0.01 USD may actually not be a trivially dismissable amount of money.
But I'm not sure it's a bad idea, I just think they chose a very awkward value to peg it at.
Anything below four decimal places is completely worthless at this point anyway; do you really have a use for being able to send 0.01c USD?