re: Winklevoss Twins Plan First Fund For Bitcoins

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There is an optional transaction fee that you pay that will go to the miner who eventually processes your transaction. Right now the standard fee for a basic transaction is .0001 bitcoins, or $0.0075 dollars, however, no fee transactions are processed pretty quickly as well (although that will probably change as the amount of bitcoin transactions grow.

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You're using "optional" loosely here. So you can incentivize a miner to place your trade in their block for execution, or you can't. I guess it would absolutely be optional but so is transacting at all, you have to pat people's backs to get them to help you out. That will never change regardless of the currency mechanism.

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You could not be more wrong here. The whole purpose of "miners" is to secure the network using proof of work. The bitcoin protocol is not lacking in security. Now, if you want to argue that third parties dealing in bitcoin lack security, then I'd say you're right.

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A third party has to exist, especially at this point in time for bitcoin. Hell even in the future bitcoin will never get broad based acceptance without third party type payment mechanisms, and these third parties will want to get compensated. No matter what you're not going to avoid fees, I can't guarantee many things but I can absolutely guarantee this.