Authy is superior to Google Authenticator for exactly this reason.  It allows reasonable recover options.

This seems like an unfortunate tradeoff to (?have to?) make.  Is the scam risk really perceived to be so high, given that so much code is actually already finished, open source, and demonstrably working?  Then again, mastercoin has had tons of funds available for bounties, and it hasn't progressed very quickly.  Does anyone understand what is taking them so long?

I've been trying to understand the bitshares idea myself, and have a discussion going with bytemaster over here http://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=13.0

I started trying to summarize our conversation, but the explanation given to me so far of the version of bitassets (e.g. bitUSD, which it's hoped would track the USD/BTS exchange rate) that are only able to refer to their own price rather than an embedded price feed of USD/BTS is so incoherent, that I can't even give a hypothetical explanation of how it should be believed to work.  There really isn't much similarity with prediction markets, because prediction markets have terminal payouts for who is right and who is wrong.  In bitUSD's case:
(a) Such information would need to be derived from an embedded USD/BTS
(b) There is no terminal horizon for bitUSD
(c) There are no lump-sum paymets from holding bitUSD which scale linearly with respect to USD/BTS.

bytemaster seems to be willing to consider a version with an embedded USD/BTS feed.  However, in that case, merely dividend payments are proposed to scale with deviations from USD/BTS.  Compare this with CFDs where the value that changes hands exactly compensates for changes in the price of the underlying - e.g. of USD/BTS.

If they were going to embed price feeds, they would be better off using CFDs, or futures, i.e. established financial products, where cash flows compensate directly and linearly for price changes. The proposal without embedded price feeds makes no sense.  How could an asset track the price of another when none of the attributes that give it value are even able to reference that price?  It's not like there are arbitrage possibilities between bitUSD and USD/BTS, like there are with e.g. ETFs, because you can't redeem bitUSD for USD, nor for anything tied to the value of USD, because nothing in the blockchain even knows about the price of USD unless it were to be embedded.

I mainly promote it by pointing out the mountains of debt hanging over the developed world, and asking people to ponder what the central banks are going to do about them, and then to ponder what the implications are for the value of currency or bond savings.  People are in love with the status quo tho

Thanks, its nice to hear feedback like this, and get some more understanding of the more technical aspects.

That's one of the motivations behind the hypothes.is annotation layer of the web.  It's a great idea, but getting mass adoption may be tough.  http://hypothes.is/

Good idea.  I'm going to start doing this where I can.

These are mostly legal questions.  Why should the bitcoin foundation have something to say about them?

May I suggest http://www.reddit.com/r/girlsgonebitcoin

It's pretty annoying.  I don't like posting just for the sake of posting.  I think we should be able to sign via bitcoin days of addresses we control, or something more sophisticated like this

When Japan's debt situation implodes, and JGBs become toilet paper, I expect the world's interest in bitcoin to explode.  1000 USD is just a start.  Assuming something better hasn't replaced bitcoin in the meantime 

If you want to consider the absolute number of bitcoins, then just change units to satoshis.  There are 10^8 =100,000,000 satoshis per bitcoin, so in your example they would be buying a house for 25,600 satoshis.  And even satoshis could be subdivided into smaller units by changing the code if there became a need for this.  

Already some think the unit of "bitcoin" is too large at about 100USD, so propose mBTC as the base unit.

Not enough!   Well, it's tempting to buy more, but instead I've decided to diversify into other ecurrency related things.  I bought some XRP and will buy some more.  I'm checking out MasterCoin now as a potential investment. It looks interesting, but the details are complicated.