IIRC, so far it's only been android devices.

Assuming this is legitimate, I'm very sorry.  So far it seems what's common among all these blockchain.info heists are linked mobile devices.  In any event, I no longer trust blockchain.info with any amount, whether my phone is linked or not.

What's interesting right now is that we are just beginning to enter a phase of institutional interest, and, I think, as luck would have it for larger investors, people were scared into putting lots of bitcoin back on MtGox.  The ask depth is looking very healthy, and that is exactly what is needed and wanted by people who want to invest $100k+.  I think in the next 2 years we could see the bid depth on MtGox reach around $50 million, and the price will need to adjust upward (and there will be a subsequent dramatic correction, no doubt).

The price is going to fluctuate a lot for a very long time, but despite what I've said over the past 2 years, I think chances are good the price is going to continue up overall.  All that development on the infrastructure, making it scalable and more robust, is just beginning and things are looking promising.

I think it should aim to be wallet neutral and try to convey something like wallet-theory.  I don't think you need to get very technical at all, and I think you can convey the right ideas in a way that most moderately intelligent internet users can understand.  I made a very brief attempt to offer a non-technical introduction to the meaning of "wallet" as it applies to bitcoin, in addition to some basic security habits.  I was aiming at those people whose security habits are really poor, and who don't understand on a very basic level what they've bought into, and who would be very unlikely to secure their bitcoins with an offline air-gapped system.  Here's the little blurb I had about the wallet jargon as it applies to bitcoin:

Volatility is probably the best criticism of bitcoin.  I think these are among the important questions to ask related to the volatility criticism:

Is bitcoin a compelling enough idea for enough people that its adoption will continue to increase over time despite that it will likely be very volatile during this adoption phase?  And, once bitcoin has been adopted by a large enough population, will its value stabilize enough to make it a better currency?  I think these are open questions that can't be answered confidently one way or another, and that's why bitcoin is, in a sense, a huge social experiment.

Are there good reasons to think adoption will increase in spite of violent exchange rate swings, and are there good reasons to think that if adoption increases enough the exchange rate volatility will fall to acceptable levels such that bitcoin is a better currency?

Some time needs to be devoted to helping people understand what "wallet" refers to in the context of bitcoin.  Essentially, that "wallet" refers to a system that manages private keys, and that one must have control of the private key associated with a bitcoin address in order to dispense whatever value that address has associated with it.  Understanding that, I think, influences security decisions, and, I hope, rules out online wallets as safe wallets.  That, of course, emphasizes an important value of bitcoin -- namely, that it allows people to secure their own wealth.

I'm of the opinion right now that mainstream adoption of bitcoin is to some degree dependent on elevating the security education of the entire population of prospective users, because I think there's unlikely to be a safe and easy way to secure bitcoins for the foreseeable future.

This underscores the fact that bitcoin isn't ready for mainstream, as the simplest and most secure way to store bitcoin wealth is still more trouble and more technical that what most people are prepared to implement  (i.e. offline, air-gapped private keys with encrypted and physical backups).

Right now, I wouldn't be pairing blockchain.info wallets with mobile devices.  I actually do pair a blockchain.info wallet with my iPhone, but that account only watches addresses associated with offline private keys.  I cannot spend from it, and neither could anyone else.

This thread just reminded me that I forgot to send in my info for the liquidation claims process.  I think the deadline was sometime in January.  Oops.  But, the odds of getting those 150BTC back, or anything remotely close to that amount, seemed, and still seemed, so remote that it just wasn't on my mind.  I guess somebody's got them, will get them, so you're welcome zou, or Amir, or liquidators, or whoever ends up with them.  I've just been counting that as the cost of learning the value of offline security.

Did you take any backups of your blockchain.info wallet?

I'm in the process of moving everything offline again. 

Things are looking pretty healthy, and I'm not just talking about price.  Its still only a week out from a pretty violent market events, so I wouldn't want to be too quick at pronouncements about leaving double digits.  I feel like the project is at a crossroads now because of all the exposure over the past few weeks.  I hope service providers are thinking further ahead in the future now with respect to scalability.

In context he essentially said that you shouldn't buy them, unless it's with money you can afford to lose, because the exchange rate is all over the place.  I thought it was a pretty fair, albeit very short, discussion about bitcoin.  The bitcoin infrastructure is still in development and so is the protocol.  I do think the value is likely to go up, at this point, even if it does so in violent moves, but let's not forget this is still an experiment.

Was just about to post that.  Wasn't expecting to see that so soon.

As a precaution I wiped my blockchain.info wallet using MultiBit and the latest encrypted backup I had.  Back to your offline wallet bitcoins, go on, get in there, go on now.

Hopefully not that.  And hopefully the load on websites doesn't bring them down.  Still, I think with all the attention the project has been getting it might be time for website operators to up their bandwidth.

Maybe so.

Bitcointalk.org, bitcoin.org, blockchain.info, bitcoincharts.com.  The exchanges too, but mostly other stuff.

I wouldn't expect this to have too much of an effect on price in the short term.  I'm more concerned about what that kind of attention could do to bitcoin websites.  Especially with many still vulnerable to DDoS. 

Not sure how I feel about this.  It's neat that it'll be talked about in that forum, but I'm not sure most bitcoin services are prepared for the kinds of loads that things like Colbert can bring.