Wow is it possible that GigaVPS could get scammed twice? Once by pirate and once by BFL?

This is a good indicator. Once ASICs come out the FPGAs have much less value - so why would they want them back? Well, because if you get them back but ASICs never ship then you have a huge mining rig with excellent value as ASICs haven't yet pushed up the difficulty.

So not only will you be smarting from not getting your ASICs but you'll have to put up with knowing that the bitcoins you're using are being mined by your very own rigs in the fraudsters hands. Which explains why they didn't mind shipping FPGAs in the first place as they knew they actually having you pay for their own super rig.

This reminds me of that Woody Allen movie where they open a cookie shop next to a bank to set up cover while they tried to tunnel into the vault. Meanwhile the cookie shop takes off as a successful business and they are stuck in a quandary as to whether they should rob the bank or not...

Besides, by your logic if we actually run away with the idea that this is a really elaborate con- why wouldn't they just use ASIC's as a setup for a even BIGGER scam, like ASICS v.2, or use ASIC v.2 for the even bigger scam ASIC v.3? Certainly after multiple iterations of putting out confirmed, verified, working, high-quality equipment the amount of trust the community would have in them would be through the roof. Just imaging the pre-order volume for ASIC v.5!

but: i am only good at getting scammed, not at detecting scams. so: who knows...

Pirate default bankrupted Social Security?!?

[Warning: poster is batshit crazy]

I think bitcoin is hastening a technological singularity, so saving it for the "rest of my life" seems impossible to determine right now. I'll work until my services are no longer required, at which point I'll have to calculate what speed I can run at while living off deflation indefinitely.

[/crazy]

I understand how nuts this sounds, so when pitching bitcoin to people I kinda don't mention what I plan on doing with mine.

As far as i can tell bitcoin doesnt hold actually wealth but is based on the worth of other currencies around the world.

As far as i can tell bitcoin doesnt hold actually wealth

Just to pre-empt you, since you're asking about this now but the concepts have been discussed for 2 years now, start with what's already been discussed.  First, read through the examples on the Bitcoin Contracts page.  There's lot of examples mixing multi-sig with locktime, etc.  Also, for the specific buyer-seller escrow case, read through the thread that I started with Gavin to discuss exactly that -- create ways for two-party escrow without risk of coins being lost forever.

The buyer-seller problem is complicated because the situation is not symmetric, and dealing with the asymmetries requires some care to not give either party an advantage to being a dick.  I'd appreciate if you read and responded in those threads with your ideas, so that progress can continue ironing them out (but of course, read them first ).

It's possible to do this with a 2-of-2 transaction between buyer and seller.  Then both parties have to find an agreeable resolution before anyone gets the money.  Thus, neither party has any incentive to try scamming the other.  However, there's a risk that the coins are locked forever if there is no resolution, so I had started a thread to discuss how it might be done without a third-party.  It's complicated, but it works if you include "risk deposits."  I think most of the complexity can be hidden under-the-hood, though. 

In most cases, you should just use a third-party.  It's very cheap for third-parties to operate because they never really "handle" the money themselves.  But one of the beauties of Bitcoin is that you can have the bitcoin network itself act as your "trusted third-party" in cases where privacy is critical, or the two parties can't agree on a trustworthy third-party.

What if one loses his smartphone? Nowadays how does it works with the double authentication in this case?

Simply put:  regular bitcoins only need to be signed by one address (private key) in order to be spent.  If coins are encumbered in a multi-signature transaction, it requires multiple signatures -- perhaps multiple, different, geographically separated computers.  Or multiple people.  Perhaps 2 out of 3 owners of a company will need to supply signatures to send the coins.

There's a very rich set of functionality that can be enabled through multi-sig.  Escrows, contracts, I can't even fathom all of them myself.  But the key is that there is no longer a single point of vulnerability for multi-signature-required coins.  An attacker will have to compromise multiple computers/people/nodes/servers in order to steal those coins.

EDIT: there's other features of multi-sig that might actually make it easier to spend [allow any one of multiple people to access them], or produce escrow such that defending against an attacker is not exactly the intent.  But I expect that the most common use-case will be for regular users to split their private keys between two devices (such as primary computer and smartphone), such that both devices need to be compromised for the attacker to get the coins (and the user will have to access both devices to use it).

Unfortunately, all this comes with a lot of extra complexity.  But it's up to application developers (like me), to try to make it useful for non-Bitcoin-experts.  And I look forward to digging into it after Armory becomes beta.