I think this article nails the description of a problem that Russ Roberts also alluded to on EconTalk -- that bitcoin can change and those changes are made somewhat democratically.(http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2011/04/andresen_on_bit.htm...). I think libertarians assume that the bitcoin network will be full of other libertarians. The article is right that the network may also be full of big entities whose behavior is regulated. Whatever your feelings about regulation, this would seem to make bitcoin less interesting.

I think one option is to accept that the bitcoin protocol will be forked massively and design it from the ground up to support exchanges between various versions of the protocol. That way, libertarians could avoid versions with inflationary policies. In this setup, would there be any reason for an entity to choose an inflatable flavor of bitcoin? Perhaps certain businesses and banks would be coerced to through regulation and that would create more widespread demand for those forks. It seems possible that most users would use the regulated bitcoins and the libertarian version might become a black-market currency.

All this feels not too different from the current situation where you can invest in gold or leave your money in a fiat currency. I guess the main difference is that the "gold" (i.e., the non-inflating bitcoin forks) might be less traceable and more liquid than true gold is today. I'm beginning to suspect that, while bitcoin is a damned-cool technical idea, it isn't likely to massively change the world other than, perhaps, to grease the wheels of black-market transactions.