This is not an error. Government, by definition, will attract the worst elements of society who will use its unique powers on their interest. An industry cannot use guns itself to rule out competitors, but it can bribe government to pass laws which end up doing the same thing.

Just think in terms of costs and incentives. Put it in numbers to make it simpler. For example, imagine there is some particular law which, if approved, would cost every 300 million US citizens the equivalent of $1 each. On the other hand, this same law would benefit a small group of 100 individuals making them earn the equivalent of $2 million each.

Net = 100*2.000.000 - 300.000.000*1 = -100.000.000

The entire society loses the equivalent of $100 million. It's clearly a "bad law", even if we just get the net results, ignoring the unethical aspects of income redistribution. And it's clearly a law that inevitably will be approved.

That is simply because, if you're among those who would lose $1, you won't even bother knowing about such law, not to mention organize with others in order to prevent it from being approved. Those in loss will not do anything to stop the law, because the costs for doing so would largely exceed the losses they will suffer with the law.
On the other hand, those earning $2 million each would probably be among the ones writing the law, and would even invest more than one million each in lobbying and organization to get such law passed. They will win.

This "overtake by unscrupulous interests" is inevitable, and it is an inherent characteristic of government.

So are you both among those who think miners would charitably work on a net loss for the "common good" in the long future (not entirely impossible, but I'd rather not rely on that), or do you have another idea on how will transactions fees remain above 0,01µBTC?
Or maybe you believe the entire user base can expect miners to set up an agreement regarding such artificial scarcity? It's true it may happen, but I feel uneasy about it.... I'd feel more comfortable if this was set by the "client consensus" instead of a "miner consensus"...

That starts to get more complex than what it needs to be, IMHO. As long as the delay of readjustment is short (24h for ex., as Gavin suggested), any formula which slightly increases the last average size should be fine. Maybe just making the increase relative instead of absolute should help with commercial holidays.

Ah bon? Merde...

Davout, j'ai lu quelque part sur un truc sur des "Small e-Money Issuers", valide en Europe. Je ne suis pas sûr si ça t'en sert, mais bon...

http://www.bitcoinfeedback.com ?

Neither am I. Using the size of the last X blocks seems more reasonable.

I'm not really convinced of that...

There are some arbitrary rules regarding what a valid block is which are of interest to the entire bitcoin community, not only miners. And I'm not talking about obvious rules like no double-spending or signature validation. I mean rules like the difficult factor or block rewards, for example. These two concern the inflation control, which are of interest of every bitcoin user.

Of course that miners that disagree with the current rules could always try to change them. But if users reject their blocks, the result of their mining may be worth much less as it would be a fork used by few.
So, when users validate blocks, they create a strong incentive for miners to obey the entire user base consensus. If instead users accept all blocks that miners decide to build upon, then it's up to the miner consensus only to decide these kind of rules. Even if they change to something which is not really of interest to the entire user base, users will passively accept it.

I think that the maximum block size is a rule of this kind. It's not only about spam. It's about creating an artificial scarcity too.
It's true that miners may come up with a good agreement since this artificial scarcity is good for them, but still, it sounds dangerous to me for the entire user base to give a "blank card" to miners to decide on that entirely on their own... don't you think?

This is not "monetary policy", maybe "transaction fee policy"...

Anyways, we pay much more to miners in the form of inflation already. Transaction fees are not that significant.

There are fully inhabited islands around the world, if you want. But all controlled by governments.

I'm a bit skeptical about this idea of "taking over" a country with immigration. I think people would react badly to that. Nationals may easily turn against you. They'd see this as a foreign invasion.

Cool, I'd join. The problem is that existent islands are all controlled by governments. I think it's easier to create a seastead, if you want freedom. Technology for that already exists, the only thing missing is either rich people wanting to "retire" like that, or a business model good enough to maintain such seastead - and brave entrepreneurs wanting to take the risks.

Sur la plus-value uniquement.

À propos, la TVA n'est pas un peu comme ça? Genre, quand tu achètes tes matières primaires, il y a de la TVA "embarquée", et après tu amortis ce montant de la TVA que tu payes pour les produits que tu vends... non?

La vente de l'or n'est pas victime de la TVA, au pas que celle de l'argent-métal l'est. Quel est le statu légal de l'or, pour s’échapper comme ça? Peut-être c'est quelque chose comme "réserve de valeur" ou je ne sais pas quoi, et l'argent-métal reste en tant que métal industriel. Si vous arrivez à appliquer le même statu de l'or aux bitcoins ce serait peut-être une façon d'éviter au moins ce vol là...

That! Or even better, build my own seastead.
But I don't think a $1000 bitcoin price would be enough for me to do so. I don't have that many bitcoins, unfortunately.

Like the professional ISPs who have waited until the last minute to migrate from IPv4 to IPv6 - not to mention that many have not yet migrated? Or like the also professional SMTP servers who have never implemented some stronger authentication system in e-mail transfers?

I'm not saying it's impossible, neither that there will be a "doomsday" due to this. I'm just saying it's a problem that will need to be fixed someday, and the earlier it's done, the easier it is. If it's done too much later, it may provoke avoidable problems like long chain splits, people not understanding why their bitcoin is not working anymore etc.

And it's not an issue only to miners, every full client performs block validations. I don't think miners will be the only ones running full clients. Those who serve the lightweight clients for ex., they will need to be full clients.

+1.
Bitcoin should not rely on that.

It could be relatively easy now or even in some months from now. But once bitcoin goes mainstream, doing such a change will not be that easy, mainly due to the coordination effort. And the more popular bitcoin gets, the harder such change becomes, that's why I still think it should be done just once. And to do it just once, a self-adjusting rule should be created... just raising a constant is bad for several reasons (multiple backward incompatible changes, gives more space for spammer-miners to abuse on, risk of dropping the fee value and by consequence the difficulty factor in the future etc)

I think the "use case" bitbills is trying to address is offline transactions, there the importance of the "face value".

That's probably the safest way to sell them, actually.

There's nothing so perverse in that. Only the fact that the guy who loses it will be distributing part of his wealth to all other bitcoin holders. He has a strong interest not to lose the card.