How to take advantage of the free transaction relay policy?

Question

I have about 0.027 BTC total, spread over 272 transactions.

Was going to send them to someone, and then the transaction fees hit me: 0.0245 BTC. This agrees with the answer to this question -- (272 txns * 180 bytes each is 49 kBytes, or 0.0005 BTC per transaction).

Then I found out about the free transaction relay policy here, which looks like it will bring things down to a more reasonable 0.004 BTC.

I'm not understanding the mechanics of setting this up, though. I can probably figure out how to do the following for the Eligius miner (I'm using the Bitcoin client with QT 4.8.3):

 Add the command-line parameter: -addnode=173.242.112.53

But the rest of the mechanics, I'm not sure. Specifically:

• How do I "broadcast the transaction to it"? Can I do this within the Bitcoin client?
• Does the person to whom I'm sending the BTC also need to add this same node?
• Do I have to specify anything else within the transaction?

My goal would be to empty my wallet of all of these tiny transactions with this reduced fee.

Edit1: Is it possible to add node 173.242.112.53 using Electrum or one of the other clients?

Answer 1

By simply adding addnode=68.168.105.168 to your bitcoin.conf file then any transaction you send will automatically be broadcast and eventually make it into a block. No one but you has to add this node and nothing special needs to be done beyond this one configuration.

Now it may be true that the bitcoin-qt client will not actually allow you to send a transaction that is against its own rules, I'm not sure as I've never tried, but if this is the case you will need a non-standard client which is another question entirely.

Note: May 2015, 68.168.105.168 is the only Eligius relay IP I can find that's active