Come to think of it, if the US government wanted to kill bitcoin today that'd be the way to do it.  Ask the NSA to switch their cracking lab to mining for a few hours over a weekend, rack the difficulty up to say 20-30 million and bitcoin is history.  The fact that it hasn't been done proves to me that the US gov't, at least, is utterly unconcerned with bitcoin.

The reserve price is set as a fixed ratio between gold and goldcoins. In my example I just picked 1000 goldcoins to 1 ounce of gold to be the fixed ratio. The auctions could take place on a website. The bids could be done with bitcoins (using the conversion rates between bitcoins, dollars, and gold) and you could also redeem goldcoins for bitcoins (using the conversion rate between bitcoins, dollars, and gold). Of course you could also use a service like goldmoney.com to to directly give people gold when they redeemed their goldcoins. I'm not sure if the details I picked are the best, but I wanted to pick some numbers to illustrate the Goldcoin concept.

For those merchants that are keeping a wallet.dat on a hosted server, how do you get around (or not care about) the trust issue of hosting company employees getting your wallet.dat?

Is there any way to set it up so that the host can't actually get to it?

(eg. by keeping the wallet.dat on your home PC and somehow connecting your websites to it via JSON? ...in that case, the host could still see your JSON password and do a 'sendfrom')

My only step so far has been to get my bitcoin directory on their 'exclude' list for their automated backups... so at least the wallet.dat shouldn't be getting copied elsewhere.

Frequent auctions of 1000 goldcoins would be scheduled whenever there were at least 1000 goldcoins available for purchase.  The minimum auction reserve price for 1000 goldcoins would be set at the price necessary to purchase an ounce of gold (i.e. gold's spot price plus around 3%). If the inventory of goldcoins available for purchase goes below 1000 goldcoins, then auctions are placed on hold until the total “goldcoins over time curve” makes it possible for more goldcoins to be available for purchase. Lastly, anyone can redeem 1000 goldcoins at any time and receive the current value of an ounce of gold less a storage fee which would be around 0.2% per year starting from the launch of Goldcoin until the date the goldcoins are redeemed (i.e. if you redeemed your goldcoins in five years from the launch of Goldcoin you would have a little less than 1% deducted from what you got for redeeming your goldcoins).

At the moment namecoin miners (whose number appears to be increasing ?!?) are donating 55882.45237847/1564057.45=.03573, with .03573/.0275=1.3.  In other words, they're donating 30% of their computing power to bitcoing miners.  It's amazing.  The worse their payback, the more miners pile on namecoin to lose money...

It's like running 3 5830s in your rig, but with one pointed at the test pool.

The mind just boggles.  Now, I can definitely see getting namecoin compiled and ready to go by the 12th (which is when it looks like block 16128 rolls around and we all need to be ready to pile on namecoin, but still.  It makes negative sense to mine NMC now.  I guess I should thank them for their donations though...

Now, when the new difficulty does happen I fully expect the NMC network computing power to increase not just by a factor of 10 like last time, but more likely by a factor of 100 if not 1000.  We should have all 2016 blocks mined out in well under 24 hours.  Good thing the chumps are willing and able to pick up the slack during the month+ long "subsidize" time to make several hour "profit" time that much better.

It's those mysterious people in the "other" mining pool, I hear they live under the stairs.

14.91!  Rally is back!  Buy now!

The hash rate has actually gone down massively today.
Network total rate is at 5.4 blocks per hour.

Also, all the big pools have had insanely long rounds today (just look at deepbit or bitcoins.lc history in the last 24 hours).
It *could* be luck, but if it is, it's a hell of a coincidence.

0 commission at mt gox right now. Pretty good trading. Has made me a lot more active.

What are you talking about? Black friday was the biggest weekend drop of all, and there are at least three, clear, weekend drops before that. The week right before black friday is one of the only exceptions in the last 6 weeks.

So wait, what you're saying is it's fun to have fewer namecoins than more?  At the end of the day you just see a balance -- your balance would be higher by mining BTC, even with one card or CPU and *buying* NMC.  Higher numbers are more fun than lower numbers, or did I misunderstand?