Why all the gloom and doom. Bitcoin will only get stronger the more it is promoted even by a "evil" government such as the Chinese is.  This could be the catalyst that puts the US behind.  Besides the few ramblings of some ludacris reps 6 months ago, there has been absolutely no talk of Bitcoin regarding US economy with in the current government reps. They should be looking how this plays within our current economy before China gets the drop on us again.  China:Stealing US/World's technology since 1976 and proud of it!

The thin client I am referring to is the one Satoshi exemplifies in his Bitcoin paper.   

Don't you also need to point the electrum thin client to an electrum server?

$3.00 seems to be a magic number.

We could build some sort of p2p credit rating system. 

Pipedreaming. 

Build a block chain that just does loans. A public key used in block chain would be your identity.  Loans would be like transactions.  The block chain length would compute the loan age.  A transactions back to the originator would complete the loan.  How well the loan was paid back and the age of the identity can be used to compute a credit rating.

Problem: How would you keep people from loaning money to themselves to artificially increase their own credit score? Possibly a loan fee?

Why hasn't anyone developed a Bitcoin thin client using bitcoinsharp or bitcoinj.  Is this in the works somewhere or do I don't know what I'm talkin about?

There is about $9 Trillion of M2(cash plus money in savings,checking and small CDs) money in the USA.  So with simple some simple math

$9,000,000 Million / BTC 21 Million(total bitcoin ever to be mined) ~= $428,000 / BTC

So if bitcoin replaced all of US dollars, 1 Bitcoin would have the same buying power as $428,000 does right now.

If Bitcoin replaced 1% of US dollars as a currency, 1 Bitcoin would have the same buying power as $4,280 does right now.

Something to think about.

I don't think a "bug" in the code could ever cause it's failure.  Even if something happened, a patch would be made and we could fork around any attack to the block-chain.

For something better to come along and replace Bitcoin is somewhat unlikely also. It appears that Bitcoin could add any features that it could possibly need.  The fact that it was first, would give it much more of an advantage of any new decentralized currency.  Any new useful features of a competing currency would just be added to Bitcoin making the new currency irrelevant.

How would Bitcoin ever fail?  There is no logical end of Bitcoin.  I think it is here forever as long as there is an internet.  I have not found a credible situation other than the end of the world that Bitcoin would ever stop.  Bitcoin is an amazing idea that I don't think will ever stop