Size isn't enough to know if it will be rejected by the 0.7 clients. Number of transactions is probably a better indicator.

This one only has 1129 compared to the 1752 that caused the last problem.

Merchants and traders who want to be bonded create a 2 of 3 multisig address with the other two parties being a bond company and an escrow company and publicly advertise this balance.

In the event of a dispute, the customer can take their case to the bond company and escrow company who then can release damages paid from the bond balance.

Merchants who want to build up a good reputation have to start small, and should be advised to invest some percentage of their gross into the bond so that customers will be willing to trust them with increasingly larger amounts. When they are ready to cash out they can have the funds released after a pre-negotiated waiting period so that existing customers have time to move their business before the bond protection runs out.

Smart customers will never risk more in a trade than the bond is worth, or else will negotiate for better terms for high risk transactions.

Child pornography: when regular slander just isn't enough to get the job done.

Gavin has said as much, so I'm not worried about the immediate future. But as far as I can from public statements about half the core dev team is not fully on board with the idea in the medium to long term.

How about a surety system instead of a rating system?

Jellyfish?

That's fine for people who are willing to make the tradeoff.

There are some people, however, who want to limit Bitcoin so that most users will have no choice but to to use off-chain transactions. That's what I mean by disenfranchisement.

Experienced traders don't know how price usually moves. Half of them beat the market in a given year, and the other half don't, and the two groups trade places frequently. It all comes down to luck.

That is one thing that is nice about Gentoo. You don't have to do that manually.

I'd just set up a bot to buy 25 BTC every 10 minutes and let it run for a week or two.

Granted that your block still needs to be valid for the rest of the network to accept it.

But your goal of "encouraging good transactions" does not require any changes to the protocol. You can reject any non-good transactions in your pool and just ask other miners to support you by mining in your pool.

Isn't that a much better solution than putting mandatory fee selection rules in the protocol?

Compliance is not the goal of laws; punishment is the goal. Those who make laws do so because they want to control and abuse other people and the laws themselves are just a means to that end.

If an abuser can convince the victim that he has somehow done something wrong to deserve the punishment, the victim's willingness to defend himself will be weak or non-existent, so the abuser is subjected to less risk. Thus the most successful abusers seek to gain control of the law, because the population has been trained to obey it and feels guilty if they are told that they have violated it somehow.

Laws that average people must break in order to survive are perfect because the increase the potential victim pool. The level of credulity in the target population is what determines just how outrageous the laws can be before the targets reject the validity of them and do start to defend themselves.

Some people appear to be using "decentralization" to mean "I never want to have to upgrade my computer ever again" or worse, "I want to be able to decide who gets to join the club and who doesn't"

If running a full node becomes impractical for home users, but millions of small, medium, and large businesses around the world are running them the system is still decentralized.

Remember mybitcoin.com? Linode? BitFloor?

Start a mining pool. You can implement any rule you want with regards to which transactions get included and which do not. Convince other miners that your rules are the best and they will vote with their hashing power.

Non-mining Bitcoin businesses will need full nodes, and the costs of running one will be justified by the security gained by not needing to rely on a 3rd party for payment processing.

Off-chain transactions are a type of disenfranchisement.  Nearly ever advantage that makes Bitcoin superior to the forms of money it can replace is nullified unless users are able to perform their transactions on the blockchain.

As FirstAscent has helpfully demonstrated, "government" is just abusive parenting on a societal scale. The only reason we take their claims of legitimacy seriously at all is because so many people were conditioned into automatic obedience to power via authoritarian child rearing.

The state is nothing more than the most successful criminal cartel to operate in a given geographic area. Once a protection racket gets strong enough it can intimidate people into calling them a government instead of a mafia, but there is no real difference between them - it's just a linguistic trick.

The debate about whether or not it will be fixed appears to be over. It will be fixed; the only questions remaining are how and when.

I don't know why it happens but if I need to bootstrap a new node I start it up with the connect= argument to only download from a single server, ideally one on the same LAN.