Looks cool, I'll try it out.  Always nice to support BTC and SC2 at the same time.  Bet placed.  I'll update this thread when I get paid back (if I win!).

Once Bitcoin reaches critical mass, the price will become much more stable.  Until then it's a roller coaster.

How much energy consumption does FIAT currency take when you account for all energy consumed by banks and all other companies that are necessary for our current use of FIAT? (Visa, mastercard, etc)?

Having more widely used payment processors accept bitcion can only be good for bitcoin as a whole, even if those processors have horrible customer service.

Confirming that JoelKatz has won this thread several times over.

On another note, why do people who have not even the slightest interest in using bitcoins stick around this forum for months and make hundreds of posts? (rhetorical)

And just because they CAN force you to give them an arbitrary percentage of your income doesn't mean they should.

EXACTLY.  The beauty of the free market is that the prices will work out.  People who wish to not provide a transaction fee, or provide a very low fee, will end up waiting much longer than those who voluntarily provide a fee.

Having some fee amount or % determined by some central authority or organization is contrary to the purpose of bitcoin.

Looks pretty nifty, will check this out, PM sent

I like what I see so far!  Would like to see more 

Jam arrived promptly and was very delicious!  Good product. Good service. Would (and probably will) buy again. 

As the BTC economy grows, the number of transactions and thus the amount collected in transaction fees will grow.  Assuming BTC is still around and going strong, by several years from now I would expect the amount of transaction fees per block to be at or over the 50 BTC level.  Just think if any significant portion of online transactions was done in BTC, you are talking about millions of transactions per day, and at even 1 million transactions per day and a .01 fee per transaction, you're talking around 70 btc in transaction fees per block on average.

I think a large part of the problem as well is that if you want to send less than .01 BTC, you have to pay a .01 BTC transaction fee.  I understand the reasoning for this, however it has some negative side effects.  If I want to send someone the equivalent of $0.05 at the current price of BTC, I have to pay $0.25 to get it there.

Wow that is a pretty awesome label.  I am also interested in some jam.  I'll send a PM!

PS - confirming that homemade goods for BTC are awesome.

Perhaps you should consider using USD.  It is an interesting currency which makes it very easy to comply with all US government regulations.  After all bitcoin will most likely be deemed an illegal currency in the coming months and you wouldn't want to be involved in something like that.

First of all I do not speak for Silk Road or for Bitcoin, as I am not affiliated directly with either. 

Second of all, I reject as false your assertion that eliminating government is "often a choice of evils" and would involve "surrender[ing] civil society to blood-thirsty thugs".  What is happening in Mexico and Latin America is a direct result of the government attempting to regulate something and being completely ineffective at it, which is causing mayhem.  Furthermore, if you think up all of the worst oppressions and "blood-thirsty thugs" that have plagued humanity over the course of history, you will find that the majority of them were governments.  In fact the most prosperous and happy societies in history were those with the most limited forms of government.

This has proceeded sufficiently off-topic now however that I will no longer reply to this train of thought in this thread, however if you wish to discuss how you think that government is necessary to save us all from the "blood-thirsty thugs", please feel free to create another thread and PM me the link.  I'd love to stop by.

By eliminating the government's role in drug policy I would be changing the current situation.  By definition this would be the opposite of advocating the status quo, so i'm not entirely sure what you are trying to say.

As far as "encouraging the prison-industrial complex along with a host of other serious social, economic, and humanitarian problems", again, I am unsure of what you are trying to say.  By removing government from the equation I am definitely not encouraging prisons of any sort.  To the contrary, I am discouraging people from being sent to prison as observed by BitterTea.  I am proposing that each person must bear the responsibility of deciding for themselves if they wish to consume drugs, alcohol, or other mind altering or even hazardous materials.  Obviously parents would be responsible for their children.  You are going to have to be more specific about all these "serious social, economic, and humanitarian problems" you foresee, because I don't see any except that people must take responsibility for their own persons and their own actions.

And please do tell who gets to decide what a real crime is?  Murder? Drugs? Money laundering? Tax evasion? Using illegal currencies?

You should definitely help those police catch people using illegal currencies.  After all that is domestic terrorism: http://www.foxbusiness.com/on-air/stossel/blog/2011/03/22/starting-a-new-currency-is-%E2%80%9Cdomestic-terrorism%E2%80%9D .

Exactly.

I don't believe anyone claimed that parents and children never make the wrong decision.  However if your proposal is that the Government is more likely to make the correct decision then I will have to disagree wholeheartedly.

Well if you are uncomfortable in deciding if a child is mature enough then why should you be pushing an agenda for a specific age?  Perhaps you should let parents and children make their own decisions.