This has obvious advantages and disadvantages.  I agree in spirit with the majority of your post, but don't understand how this could work.
The biosphere is absurdly complex, and often irreparable on human time-scales.  A rational actor across the world can toxify a lake which destroys a local insect population which reduces the throughput of migratory birds which were themselves fertilising speciaised plants halfway around the globe with a continuing chain of effects.
These events happen naturally at a variable frequency, but the rate at which they are now occurring is effectively an emergency.

In the history of humanity, we generally destroy enormous wealths of biological diversity for individual economic gain.  Now that individuals have the potential to damage large amounts of the Earth through market forces, many people believe that they should be preemptively prevented.
An extreme example is of Joe Bloggs deciding to set up a fission power plant to sell power to his neighbours.  Even if they all agree, the potential damage could be felt worldwide.



Yes and no.  I went a little off-topic there.


I don't necessarily support full social or economic freedom, along with a great many people.
I'm also not sure that communism is essentially contradictory.  I believe that it makes sense to a certain portion of the population who conceive of humanity as a mass entity striving to betterment.  The socialist impulse has been useful in bettering the conditions of the poor, just as it has been useful in suppressing large numbers of people.
The libertarian principle has been responsible for much of the rise of science, culture, and technology, but I have yet to see it applied stably over large numbers of people.

Remember, in an Ant colony, the libertarian fails.  Amongst Piranha, the communist is lunch!

I'm interested in hearing more about this.
There exists a significant proportion of the population who, despite the wishes of the rest, will fill the air with smog and the waters with run-off for a cent on the dollar.
If unrestrained, some people will burn the Earth to a husk to get the golden egg before others do.

State-sponsored force has been the only agency so far by which any modicum of forward-thinking can be imposed on the market.  Without it, fridges would still be pumping out CFCs, car fuel would contain lead, agricultural run-off would destroy a large proportion of marine ecosystems and the powerful would restructure the economy to impoverish and undereducate the powerless in order the reinstate feudalism.

I'm fond of social libertarianism, but I can't imagine how fiscal libertarians see the world; they honestly seem as naive to human nature as communists.

I do worry about extremely small transactions.
Assuming 1 BTC = 1 USD, and the majority of transactions require a transaction fee, will people be able to transfer uBTCs with fees in the nBTC range, or are fees more likely related to fixed costs?  Will small transactions just take days to process, or will "free and almost free" transactions be permanently sidelined?

Cool.  I've never met anyone who told me they were a gnostic.

I really like Jesus, for the most part, but I don't like all the Abrahamic baggage.  Frankly, I think Jesus needs to talk to his abusive father.   That's why I like the Gnostic gospels and some of the other alternative early Christian sects.  I also like the bits where Buddhism mixes with Christianity.

Would you mind sharing which type of gnostic you are?

I've just contributed to the bounty so that I could meaningfully vote yes.

How does 1 mBTC sound as a default tip?  Nobodies going to throw BTCs around in bulk, but I'd be willing to go on a tipping spree at that rate.

It would be nice if the system didn't require registration.  A bitcoin address is 34 characters, so there's room for two addresses plus a lot of metadata.  A content producer's client could tweet "BTC address: 18VqR8RgHmY6tG9Y8JXbkM8zncVm8npt1p"  (for instance!) and the tipping client could parse their twitter stream for the most recent address and send the tip.

In the event that the receiver hasn't tweeted a receipt address, as will be the norm in the beginning, the tip could be placed in the sender's local escrow and an @mention with the amount donated, to be accepted within 72 hours, with a link to bitcoin.org or weusebitcoin.com.

I think a browser plugin would be the easiest way to implement this right now.  Extensions for Firefox and Chrome would probably cover most of the interested market.

Or to whether a group of people can put together the skillset and organisational resources to commit such massive fraud.
Though I am not one of them, there are many people on this planet who would happily do this, so the question becomes one of difficulty.

The only property of the loans>bitcoins fraud that is specially useful is if it actually crashes the banks and inflates the bitcoin economy to too-big-to-fail status.

People positioned to perform this fraud have to control their own microeconomy, or agreement will have to emerge from an already large community (or a small, unethical community, I guess.

Russian mobster, large corporation, drug cartels, third-world leader in receipt of foreign aid.

Ireland is in a perfect position:
Receive large amount of IMF loans
Default and invest in bitcoins
Crash the Euro
PROFIT!