So?  Freedom of speech means that the government can come after me for what I say, but that does not mean that I won't have to deal with those other citizens that I tend to offend.

My prediction didn't survive 20 minutes.

I was denied my coat by deception, but it would have required the use of force if the deception had failed.  Otherwise, why bother to sneaksteal?  If the person is entitiled to my coat because I'm not wearing it, what does it matter if I know that he is stealing it?  It's because theft is still the act that initiates the force.  Initiation of force is not the same as the use of force.

I can conceive it, this doesn't mean that I agree with your interpretations of it.  There is an implicit agreement between myself and the restraunt owner, that he agrees that I own what I arrived with (so long as there is no credible claim otherwise) and thus, by agreeing to take responsibility for my property, is partially responsible for defending it against theft or destruction.

Don't quit your day job.  Oh, sorry.

Yes.  I'm seriously asking how your strawman situation supports your claim that libs are not against all initiations of force.  This may or may not be true for any given lib, but lets leave that aside for a moment and examine your contrived situation.  If someone steals my coat from the coatrack at a resturant, how does that affect my views on initiation of force?  He initiated force, after all, because I was denied use of my own property.  I'm not likely to be terriblely concerned about the theft of a coat, beyond the inconvience of the moment, but my freedom to decide to give my coat away or not was denied me by someone else.  Was it not?

Really?  How does your post make this point?

I'm sure that's what the guy who bought the 10K BTC pizza was thinking, too.

"Garzik says that they have cooperated with authorities in conjunction with Silk Road and are currently working to distance themselves from the illegal site. Similarly the site is working to make their service entirely legal and in conjunction with government standards."


Sounds like Garzik was feeding them a line of crap.

"There will only ever be 21 Trillion bitcoins!  This time we mean it!"

We could probably get away with only a 5 decimal point shift, but not a 4.  Six would be a decades long solution. If we want to do this twice, we could only shift 3; but we need to do this together.  Just depending upon the end user to select the most appropriate view is going to do more harm than good if we don't adjust the default view.

Or cell phones.

Those are all conventions based on the same frame of reference.  Try doing that when one party thinks a bitcoin is an order of magnitude more valuable than the other party.

Yeah, the co-ops that they put on the phones are particularly good at giving that impression regardless of their true thoughts.

No, no danger there.  The value of the bitcoins won't change, just the display of them.  If the users of said site transfer their coins out from that site, their new client would display the new number.  In truth, bitcoins are just a 64 bit integer anyway, and the decimial point was put into the middle of that 16 decimal place (in base ten) integer as an arbitrary decision by Satoshi.  We have all known that it would have to move eventually, we just didn't really expect that day would come so quickly.

i don't have an issue with a client that presents the balance however the user wants, but I'm talking about changing the default state, and thereby changing the standard way we discuss value.  Otherwise, there will be the need to explain our personal frames of references with every transaction, or risk a misunderstanding undermining our businesses.

More difficult, yes.  Businesses in Africa won't care that bitcoins are illegal for businesses in the United States, or if they do, they will be happy about it because they will get a monopoly capture advantage that they didn't have to lobby for.  Internet sales are largely unaffected by the location of the business.  For that matter, the business could be in some small country in Africa, next to the servers; while the products are shipped by a standard dropshipping agency in the United States.  Win-Win!

I suggested 3 back in November, nobody listened.  Now we have a condition wherein we are already pricing things in fractions of a coin.  If we only move 3 over, we will have to do it again in another 6 months.

We need to explain this, and set a date for the shift.  Otherwise this is going to have to happen later, when the average bitcoin user is much less informed than the average user of this forum.  The results, I believe, could be mass confusion.  It could cause mass confusion anyway.

Um, no.  Call them up and complain that your bitcoin trade was charged back and they will cancel your account for violation of their policy rules.