Great posts Peter, excellent summary of the situation.

I start every day with a quick scan of the news, and then move on. However, today two items really stand out showing how freedom of speech and the rule of law which are fundamental to modern society are being aggressively corroded by governments and companies:

UK secret trial
A major terrorism trial is to be heard entirely in secret in a “totally unprecedented departure” from centuries of open justice, it can be disclosed.
For the first time in British legal history, two men charged with serious terrorism offences will be kept anonymous and the press and public will be excluded from their trial, the Court of Appeal heard.

MPs and civil rights campaigners said it was an “outrageous assault” on the principles of open justice and set a “very dangerous precedent”.
Prosecutors have successfully applied for the case to be heard in private on grounds of national security but media organisations are trying to overturn the decision.
Journalists have up until now even been banned from reporting the fact that a trial was to be heard in secret.

The move has fuelled concerns over the growth of secret justice in British courts, which has already spread to civil cases and celebrity privacy challenges.
But a major criminal case being heard entirely behind closed doors risks ripping up the very tradition of open justice in the UK, which dates back to the Magna Carta of 1215.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/terrorism-in-the-uk/10876499/Secret-terror-trial-is-assault-on-British-justice.html

LinkedIn censorship and collusion
A major international social networking company is being criticized for assisting with China’s aggressive censorship of matters concerning the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests.
 
At the request of Chinese authorities, the professional connection site LinkedIn is removing content from member’s sites that reference the protests or their subsequent violent suppression.
The content, which can take the form of posts, messages or other comments, is being removed without the members’ permission.

http://www.voanews.com/content/linkedin-faces-flak-for-censoring-on-behalf-of-china/1929613.html

Is anyone else sickened by these?

Yes. JS is the worst kind of troll: one that speaks with an academic and level-headed authority but wastes no opportunity to stick the knife in. Why does he spend so much time on this forum when he could just get a life and wait until (he hopes!) Bitcoin crashes and burns, and then come back here laughing and gloating? The reason is extreme butt-hurt of the first order by missing out buying in at $1 a coin. Now the strategy is to talk (troll) the price down which has the dual goal of punishing all those who did get in early, while possibly enjoying a new chance to do the same at 2010 prices.

Another incident:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=341146.0

Looks like Willett has really bad tax advisors. He didn't want to sell MSC, but was told he needed to sell some to cover capital gains tax. Problem is that his capital gains mostly evaporated after, and probably because of his selling.

Last year someone did pay $3600 per bitcoin (however GoXBTC is dead now).

What is also interesting is that in a little over 2 years from now 75% of bitcoins that can exist will be created, and not long after that the number of bitcoins permanently lost will exceed those that are yet to be mined.

No money arrives on a weekend. People with money already sitting on the exchanges are buying now, probably because they have given up waiting for another major dip and want to be on the train before fresh money arrives Monday.

I know you are not happy with the name, but no single name is perfect and would satisfy everyone. That is a side-issue. What is far more important is moving to a two decimal place currency. Maybe the poll could be improved in hindsight, but once it was started it needed to remain untouched.

Once your activity hits 30 you should be able to vote. I won't be closing it as I consider this issue really crucial to Bitcoin's future. At the beginning I was unsure, but all the feedback has made it clear.

As an aside, 600 voters is a milestone for bitcointalk and I doubt that any poll here has received half as much interest before!

It does seem to be a lot as blockchain.info indicates more like $30 million per day, except on a couple of busy occasions: late last year when the price went over $1000, and more recently when MK was shuffling his wallets around...

https://blockchain.info/charts/estimated-transaction-volume-usd?daysAverageString=7

"This email address（mtgox_trustee@noandt.com）is used only for the purpose of sending messages, and we are unable to check and respond to any replies to this email address."

Translation: we will not get our hands dirty helping creditors with legitimate claims as we just want to earn our fees with as little effort as possible.

It needs more than just a pump, much much more, ... like 17 million volts in the neck of that Frankenstein's corpse.

Damn right. Only recently I became a Mac user. I still keep a PC with Vista running but I will never move to Windows-NSA-spyware-8.

Excellent observation.

Everyone has been watching the clear downtrend all year and now it is finally broken the buyers are returning in force. Many of them did not leave their fiat on exchange so this upward pressure will last some days. Monday should be monumental.

$400 is too cheap for a bitcoin, just as most of us thought.

Sunlot want to pay 1 btc, not 650k btc. They want control of the supposedly 200k btc left (assuming the private keys can be extracted from MK) which would be used to restart the exchange with the intention of paying 650k back to all those who are owned money. That would take years of exchange profits. Color me surprised if 2 years later the 200k is spent and only a tiny fraction of 650k is earned back for disbursement.

The ChinaPUMP^TM is on full throttle.

Question is when the manager of City Wok calls for ChinaDUMP^TM

Seems reasonable, though there is enthusiasm for a simple term for general use.
A non-Latin character or an embedded capital letter, certainly do not help except for in limited technical usage.

Implementing a smaller denomination is best achieved in a 2-step process.

1. Asking (nicely!) Bitcoin website owners and software authors to support "bits" for display purposes which users can select as a drop-down or config option, or showing both btc and bits where appropriate.

2. Publicizing a "switch-over" date, such as January 1st 2015, when the option becomes a default setting.

This allows months of time to see that the ecosystem is still on-board with the change, the rate of it being supported and feedback from users. Perhaps a website or thread could track all the various Bitcoin sites and systems where "bits" can be seen.

There are merits to other names: mikes, ubits etc, but the fact is no name is perfect. There will always be a difference of opinion. What is most important is making Bitcoin easier to use for everyone, and that is eliminating small decimals and the psychological barrier of a high unit value.