Some clients may have a default fee amount, but I doubt that those will survive in the marketplace.

There can be no 'cartel' in Bitcoin, because there can be no monopoly.  The barriers to entry into the generation pool are simply too low, and there is no way that a government could enforce an artifical monopoly even if it wanted to.  If the transaction fees begin to creep up due to consolidation of the generation pool, others will begin to notice and they will choose to participate as the possibilites of a random reward become worth the costs.  This will create a price point that is ever fluctuating, but balanced, as this effect removes any pricing power of any group of generators in collusion.  I would predict that the transaction fees will be somewhere between 0% and 3% on average, but closer to 0%; because 3% is where the credit card companies and PayPal have set their prices, and they do have a degree of pricing power.  If a 'cartel' were to set up a datacenter that could dominate the network, but only include transactions with fees at say 2.9% (PayPal's regular rate), they would be ignoring an entire set of fee paying transactions that only non-cartel generators could capture.  The results being that the network would generally see that 2.9% is the premium price to get one's transaction recorded quickly, but if one is willing to wait until one of the non-cartel generators then there is a budget option (currently that option is free).  The cartel could not be certain that they could even capture the premium fees, so they would have a choice to make.  Either recognize that they don't have the kind of pricing power that they thought that they did, or ramp up their generation capabilities until they do.  The second choice creates an 'arms race', as for as long as the cartel increases their capacity, they must attempt to pass on that cost, but they can only do so temporarily before non-cartel generators see a profit opprotunity to do the same.  Eventually the cartel hits a point that it can no longer continue, and in the meantime the system has benefited from their attempts to corner a market that cannot be cornered.

Of course, anyone with the resources to do any of this is also going to hire people who know the system, who are likely to point out that they can't really do what it is that they want to do.

I'm just an old fashioned kind of libertarian.

That's not really what happened in 1929, or 1932.

Nope, he was right.  You need to do more research.

That's not capitalism.

Those are not examples of failures of capitalism, but failures of corproratism.  Not that capitalism can't fail, but it is a self-correcting system.

http://www.makerbot.com/

Seen one in person recently.  Slick little machines.

It' the former that enables the latter.  Before the banking acts of 1913 that legalized fractional reserve banking as well as the Federal Reserve itself, fractional reserve banking was considered fraud.

A substantial amount of bitorrent traffic is legitimately licensed material. For example, every GNU/Linux distro has a torrent for their latest release install disk.  Many semi-amateur tv serials are released on bittorrent (The Guild?) and in the past some serials in syndication were released onto bittorrent at the same moment that the episode aired.  Stargate SG1 did this for a time, unofficially, while they were in dispute with the SciFi channel.  Those episodes were easy to spot as 1) they were released before the end of the show's first airing (impossible for anyone without insider access) 2) they were of dvd quality 3) they did not contain any commercials, broadcast indentifer overlays, or editing marks and 4) sometimes contained the editing marks that are never broadcast.

This reminds me of a sneakernet that was intentionally set up in Africa to allow residents of small towns to send & receive email, as well as request entire websites for educational research.  Once the website was captured and shipped to the distant school, a modified squid would keep a copy of that website on cache indefinately.

It would be great if a durable flashdrive could be made into the form factor of a mailable postcard, but then how would you know who to mail it to next, and how could you encourage the current user to send it to the next guy in the chain rather that keep it for himself?

Yes, but the practicalities of such a thing keeps getting in their way.

My understanding was that the client already did a blockchain recheck upon startup if the index was missing.  I did this when I first started, and it sure seemed like it was marching through the chain.  Doesn't it require an index to function anyway?  Why would it assume that the blockchain was valid upon startup?  Anyone could have edited it.  The genesis block is encoded into the client, isn't it?  That and the blockchain checkpoints are the only parts that are assumed correct, or am I wrong? There is no good reason to prevent a blockchain download via other methods.  In a future with the bitcoin network running close to it's capacity, downloading the entire blockchain over the P2P network will be harmful. 

Even a chain that has already been pruned of it's merkle trees should be able to be verified from the start, otherwise what good is using a merkle tree at all?

Betamax was a professional recording standard before VHS, but VHS was in the mass market first.

Stumbled across this post from Satoshi from two years ago, explaining his views on botnets, the double spending attack, and the blockchain attack.  According to this, the blockchain attack is just another form of double spend as the attacker would not only have to time his attack but would only be able to capture coins he recently owned.

http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg09967.html

I was responding specificly to his concern about transaction fees, not the block size limit.  The hard limit is a real concern, but also one that I imagine has been well considered by others before us.  Did anyone bother to search the archives before diving into this thread?  The block limit exists to prevent spamming from packing the blocks, not support transaction fees.  I think that the recently instituted priority rule does the job at least as well as the hard block limit, but it's not enough on it's own. 

It was a petty crappy movie.

Then something is wrong, because I still get the forum's new topics via Google Watch, and much more besides.  From that alone, I can tell that interest on the blogosphere has increased much since the EFF put up their bitcoin address.

Austrian economic theory says that no one is smart enough, because no one can have all of the information.  The best that we can do is take a guess, and I would guess that it isn't going to be a real problem.  Certainly not in my lifetime.

The first thing we need is a working interface with Mybitcoin.com that can use as many of it's functions as possible, such as it's addressbook.  It would be nice if the interface can play nice with bu.mp in order to use it to trade addresses with the rest of your contact info.  The standalone client is after that.

What I mean by "in the absence of Internet" is that the client is a true 'lightweight' client, with a pruned blockchain (which requires that merkle tree pruning be implimented in the main client first) so that the user doesn't have to be connected to the Internet at all times in order to send money, as a website interface would.  This allows a client to create a transaction with or without the Internet and send it whenever the Internet becomes available or by another future means such as Dash7 mesh networking if such a thing becomes available.