thoth's Journal: Bitcoin

This whole bitcoin client bug is fascinating to me. Not that I own any bitcoins or plan to buy any... I'm curious on how the currency will handle this bug. Specifically, in a currency whose express design goal is avoiding central authority and the imposition of arbitrary rules, how do you convince people to voluntarily upgrade/downgrade/whatever to a different client version, when such a change may not be in their best interests. How to force/incent everyone to run a client version - isn't doing that itself an imposition of an arbitrary rule?

I'm reading the thread over at bitcointalk, and let's just say there is a "gold mine" (har har) of info there. I'll need to study it at home.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=152030.0