What do you base this statement on?

There already is, but it's sort of a sliding scale.  Free transactions can only be so large individually, and take up so much of the blockspace in total.  Beyond that there is a hardcoded fee schedule, the more transactions in a given block, the higher the transaction fee included must be in order to qualify to be added to that block.  This fee schedule is enforced by the network because if a block's size is over any of those 'soft' limits, there must be at least one transaction within it that pays at least the minimum for that tier, or it's rejected as an invalid block.  So even without the hard blocksize limit, there are mechanisms in play to strongly encourage senders to add a transaction fee if they desire their transaction to be processed quickly.  It is this mechanism that has delayed free transactions in the past, not the hard blocksize limit.  We have never come anywhere near the blocksize limit.
There could be, but I doubt that either of us can come up with one.  If someone does come up with one that is significantly better than the proof-of-work system of Bitcoin, a better cryptocurrency will come into being.
The whole point of the proof-of-work system is that any direct attack on the system is expensive relative to the expected gain, so that crime doesn't pay.  Perhaps this still leaves Bitcoin open to an attack intended to outright destroy it by some malicious entity with vast resources, but even though I can acknowledge that such an attack is possible; it's far from cetain that it would be successful.  There are simply too many unknowns.  In the same vein, China could have long ago destroyed the American monetary system by the simple act of dumping US currency reserves and US treasury bonds upon the market, for they have more of both than the whole of the US public does.  This would probably cause massive inflation of the US FRN, if the US government does nothing, but this is not a certainty either; and would be expensive for the Chinese economy as well.

Attacks upon a WoT system are more subtle, and potentially much less costly.  One is simply the act of 'node identity spoofing', faking the identity of a trusted node.  Another is the 'scorched earth' event, wherein a node develops honest trust, and then turns bad once the opprotunity is presented.  You can make both of these attacks difficult technically, but you cannot make them impossible, nor particularly expensive since I do not need any great resources for either attack.  Other attacks requiring coordination are possible as well.  This does not include the basic network attacks upon the hosting servers themselves, the security of which is importan in a web of trust.  Bitcoin's collective security is not dependent upon the level of security of any given node.

I suppose we can address that issue when it comes up.  If Bitcoin is still the cryptocurrency of the Internet in 2130, feel free to bring it up again.

good plan

A cartel is difficult to maintain in a true market, because the smaller members always have an incentive to cheat.
The percentage of relative power of the cartel must rise in conjunction with the delay.  If the delay were actually ten minutes, the cartel would need at least twice the computational power of the entire remainder of the network.  A 5 minute delay would require at least 50% more than the entire remainder of the network.  Even a delay of a few seconds puts the cartel at a disadvantage.
And the cartel will need access to the rest of the network as well.
Incorrect.  See above.

In your presented case, the cartel would be very fragile, even if it could ever even develop the dominance.  The network is currently very small, projecting the size of the network when the userbase is ten times larger tells me that the network will become very difficult, indeed.

Yes, exactly.  Many of whom thought they were anarchists.

I used those descriptors because I don't have better ones.  Of course there are "European" anarchists in the US, and "American" anarchists is Europe.  Nothing is absolute.

See above.
By name dropping?  Not really.

I can accept the possibility that I'm wrong, but I've read all that you have presented on this theme in the past, and probably much more than you can produce, and IMHO the most likely possibility is that you are confused about your own role.

It can, it just doesn't.  It's on the future features list.  Feel free to contribute a patch.

That's funny!

Not at all.  The European version of anarchism is indeed socialist, but they are not libertarians.  European anarchists are statists who oppose the factions in control of the state and the ideologies that they represent, but not statism itself.  Which has much to do with why American anarchists tend to use other terms, such as 'volunteerist', so as not to be associated with the European understanding of the term.  Certainly there are those in Europe who believe themselves to be actual anarchists, but those are those whom Stalin called "useful idiots".  Violent or chaotic anarchy is always a transitional political state, and one the Marx himself advocated as a stepping stone to socialism.  And although some/most libertarians are truly anti-state, most are not under any illusion about the fragility of the rule of law under a stateless political society, and any solution is basicly a mini-state.  Notice, if you will, that American anarchists, no matter what they call themselves or how badly they might want to, never riot.  They have not since the Weather Underground of the 1970's, who were quite openly anarchists of the European sort.  They don't riot because the destruction of private property (any property owned by anyone not their target, whether they like them or not) would violate their principles concerning non-aggression and the rule of natural/common law.

Not really; unless you are saying that you are a libertarian except within your own family, and then you are socialist, which pretty much means that you are a libertarian.  You cannot be for liberty and socialism at the same time, they are opposing ideologies.  Heads would explode.

Down or not, the client will attempt to connect to it's internal list to fill out it's connections.  It doesn't depend on any one source for data, so such an attempt to prevent new clients from bootstrapping the blockchain would be short lived.  Clients that have already bootstrapped remember their past connections anyway.

Which is a contradiction in terms.

Not for long, and not likely to any useful degree even in the short term.  The current client no longer requires the IRC channel even for initial bootstrapping.  I don't even let my client connect.

Did you guys ever consider that it's just some guy trying to break up his coins into change?

And yet, as ugly as it may be, that's how nLockTime transactions work.  They form a kind of pseudo-escrow, allowing the sender to prove to the seller that he actually has the funds, without actually sending them.

None of these three attacks would do a thing to the running Bitcoin network, and aren't even likely to do much to prevent new users.

The assumption in intended is that there was no such case, but only the intent to cause a panic.

Freedom of speech is a negative right, that the federal government does not have the authority to limit your ability to say what you wish about it.  And it does not.  You can say these things, but once you do you can be persecuted based upon the content.  Not by critiquing the actions of government in general, or the actions of government agents in particular; but by advocating harm being done to another person.  Generally such things are taken more seriously when the person in question also happens to be an agent of the state.  Freedom of speech doesn't imply you have the right to scream "fire!" in a crowded theater any more than the freedom to keep and bear arms implies you have a right to shoot your neighbor if he stumbles drunk into your backyard and pisses on your lillies.

And that is considering places wherein the public actually has a freedom of speech.

Ripple is not a currency, but a web-of-trust based credit system.  It still depends on a common reference of value.  Said another way, Ripple users can use any common metric; such as ounces of gold or silver, fiat currencies, or whatever; as their medium of exchange, but the system itself does not establish one.  Bitcoins could be traded well in this manner, but in the end, Ripple is credit; if the buyer had the bitcoins, he could just pay for it.  Ripple does permit people to trade online relative to hard money, without needing to ship the hard money itself; but it is neccessarily not anonymous.

LETS stands for Local Exchange Trading System, and it is a local "mutual credit" based currency.  It does not involve scarcity, as the credits are created at the time of the trade deal by a double entry type system.  I.E., there is some central book, and when someone buys something from a local vendor, the account of the vendor shows a credit while the account of the buyer shows a debit, but all debits and credits in the system balance out to zero.  The system requires an external peg of value agreed to by the whole of the userbase, which can be a national currency, hard money, or hours of unskilled labor.

You could start such a site on Tor, but this would likely be illegal in many juristictions.

That's pretty much how the proof-of-work system works now.  Feel free to fork the Bitcoin code to attempt what you are advocating.  And after a little while, I'll come help break your web of trust system.

Oh, yes.  I can.