Bitcoin has an extremely predictable rate of supply inflation (the kind meant here) which follows an exponential decay curve and will be under 1%/yr. by 2020 or so. There could be some very minor supply deflation after that point due to people losing their keys, but it should never become a major factor.

The price inflation and deflation you allude to is partly due to being a very young high-risk/high-reward venture. If Bitcoin is to reach even a fraction of its potential as a currency, the price per bitcoin must end up several orders of magnitude higher than it is now to match the increased demand, or there simply wouldn't be enough to go around. On the other hand, concerted political opposition could render it useless in most of the major markets. Whether the innovators or the politicians will win in the long run is anyone's guess at this point, thus the risk.

The other part, which is likely to dominate in the long-term if Bitcoin succeeds, is a reflection of normal changes in the demand for money. Central banks usually try to dampen out demand-driven price swings by manipulating the supply of money, but they are in fact an essential part of balancing present and future demand for goods, and suppressing them leads to an economy-wide misallocation of resources.

That depends on what you're trying to trace. While it's true that the transactions themselves are public knowledge, they don't include any personally identifiable information. Tracing the movement of bitcoins through a series of single-use addresses on the blockchain is easy; tracing the changes in real-world ownership is an entirely different matter. Unlike money moving through a series of bank accounts, there is no central entity to tell you who controls each address.

The difference is that, unlike wild horses, a free market is made up of free individuals with individual rights. You're talking about putting reins on people and channeling their efforts toward ends you consider productive. Think about that for a moment. There's a word for harnessing people and putting them to work for you without regard for their rights: slavery.

The unharnessed free market may not be quite as "productive" (from your perspective) as a captive, harnessed, non-free market, but a choice between "productive" slavery and "unproductive" freedom is really no choice at all. Slavery isn't an option.

It must be horrifyingly frustrating to work for a company like Verizon as a tech, know that you can fix a problem by adding a few more links between two switches, and being told my management that you cannot because of idiotic reasons.

I'd be half tempted to just fix the issue behind their back, but then of course I'd likely be fired for insubordination!

Imagine that, fired for improving network performance. Might even be worth it if the tech doing it had another job lined up at a company that isn't as evil.

Pedantic fail^2

64K = -209.15 degrees Celsius = -344.47 degrees Fahrenheit

This because the much loved /. editor doesn't allow the degree symbol nor the & deg; html entity which I have to write with an extra space.

Jusy like phones, right?

I'm on the ground floor...

The judge is a human being, the law is subject to interpretation, and a trial is a time-boxed event. Those three things make your argument in court quite important. If you come forward with a very good argument and no rebuttal is done on the other side, it naturally skews the results, especially in a tech-related subject where the judge is most likely a bit lost. It's just how life is.

You can have a lawyer for free. Granted, it's maybe not the best one because (s)he is overworked, but it's a heck of a lot better than defending yourself.

You are so smarter than I am, I think I will spend my next month reading all your /. posts from the first to the very last. I expect my IQ to grow significantly.

That's only true if you needed their permission to do X in the first place. The EULA can't unilaterally revoke your existing rights. Generally the enforceability of a EULA rests on copyright; if you're not doing anything that would violate the copyright, you have no need to agree to the EULA. (And—in the US—simply using media you already have a legal copy of is not a copyright violation; the "temporary copy inside the computer's hard disk or RAM" reasoning originally used to justify most EULAs was struck down ages ago, when the copy is essential to the use of the media.)

You do realize that productivity is measured by economic value, right? Not by energy expended? If you're so sure that others making far more than yourself are doing similar amounts of work, why not apply for their position? You can do the job, right? Why wouldn't they jump at the chance to save a bunch of money paying you 2x instead of paying the current guy 10x? For that matter, why haven't they done this already? There's no shortage of people looking for work.

Perhaps there's more to the job than you realize.

You're thinking of pacifists, or possibly communists. Libertarians are the realists in this scenario; we realize that humans are imperfect, and that, as a direct consequence of this, giving a select group of imperfect humans the practically unlimited power of government is not a recipe for a better world. ("Select" because, for the most part, they are self-selected as the most likely to abuse the position... one doesn't generally set out to become a politician out of the belief that people have the the right to live their lives peaceably without third-party interference.)

Libertarians are opposed to all abuses of power, not just those which originate from government. We oppose the government specifically because it embodies the systematic abuse of power, and, unlike other criminal organizations, maintains the pretense that its abuses are somehow "legitimate". That does not mean that we are OK with non-government entities violating others' rights, or think that in the absence of government everyone would "just get along". There will continue to be bad actors out there; we will still need to defend ourselves against them. But without government they at least won't have a ready-made system available to amplify their offenses and shield them from the consequences.

I refer to your trolling because you answered my "There was a point to go to court with this" with "So by French law, making it a title makes it a presentation as a fact?".

These two statements may be equivalent in your view, but they are not in mine.

Additionally, not all judges are tech savvy and I can see why seeing this as the second result of a Google search with the name of the restaurant may push a judge to settle this matter in a court of law. This does not set the law, it merely indicates that a judge was convinced by ONE party to investigate further.

Maybe where you live there are no stupid trials when technology comes into play. If so, please tell me where it is, I am interested. We don't live in a perfect world and France most assuredly do not lead the pack on that front. Again, I am interested in the name of your country where no mistakes are made and every trial is exactly 100% what every parties thought it would be at the beginning.