I like the idea, but it should NOT be integrated with bitcoin.  Bitcoin is supposed to be CASH.  Cash is cash, good or bad.  Still, you preemptively answered a lot of immediate questions and concerns I had with such an idea in your OP Mike.  Well though out, and interesting idea.

wtf of course the users have a vote.  they are integral to the system.  if no users will validate a miners block and pass it on, the miner doesn't end up getting credit for it and his block is orphaned.  why would have less people (i.e. just miners, not miners AND users) be a better thing?

Aannnnnnd I just turned off my T-mobile auto-refill.  Thank you guys!!!  I ended up choosing Simple, but I appreciate both comments!

You can use Casascius's utility for escrow.

More info here, here, and here.

the longest one.  that's always the main chain.  that's why the two forks were called the 0.8 chain and the 0.7 chain.  chains that aren't the longest are the forks.  for a while the 0.7 chain was the fork until miners agreed with gavin that they should switch to it.  then it became the longest.

Uh, I think that says more about AT&T's pricing than anything.  You can get unlimited unthrolled HSPA+ 4G on T-mobile for $70 a month.  You can get unlimited 3G for less than $50 a month pretty much everywhere.  And also, I don't think there's a single mobile client that downloads the entire fucking blockchain.  The closest I know of is the Bitcoin Wallet app that downloads the blockchain headers (still completely secure), and that's like only 30 megs or something.  I don't think this is at all a problem.  Has the guy who wrote that article ever used a mobile bitcoin app?  There's plenty and they work just fine.  The lite clients are great, but if you really don't want to trust anybody, the one that downloads the headers is perfectly safe and acceptable.  How does the author not know of these when he writes this?  This is either dishonest reporting or completely ignorant reporting, both of which are really bad.

Coinabul, am I understanding this correctly?  You know for sure that the customer did not receive the product (so you know he's not scamming you), and somehow you think it's not your responsibility to fix the situation, especially when the customer paid extra for insurance?

Are you fucking high?  This is 100% on you to fix.

Scammer tag.

Does having the public key even give you any information at all other than "nope, that's not the correct answer"?

Edit: also, to answer your question OP, never.

They're reputable.  It took them a week to e-mail me back last time I e-mailed them, so they aren't good with e-mail, but I  fully expect you'll get your coins back.

Why do you think this is so?  Taking $1000 from somebody who makes $1000 a month and can't buy food if it isn't returned is of course an entirely different moral situation than taking that $1000 from somebody who makes $20000 a month and to whom it would be merely a minor inconvenience.

Even if you don't have debt, you should use a credit card for most purchases and just pay it off every month.  Then, when shit like this happens, you're not stuck with the money being gone from your bank account, and you can fade a few months of fraud investigation before getting your money back.  Credit cards are evil, but they do have their uses.

Yup, sometimes you just get unlucky and your timing is bad.  Life sucks sometimes.  That being said, you should believe in your own intellect and also always be trying to position yourself for when things go right.  Sometimes you get unlucky, but you gotta just get back up on that horse.  You can fail over and over, but all it takes is getting it right once and you're set.  JK Rowling couldn't find a publisher to sell her Harry Potter books for a long time.  They didn't know how to market them.  But she kept sending them out until somebody took a chance on them.

this means absolutely nothing

I tis unlikely they will do this any time soon.  It's much more in their interest to gain favor with the US gov and find a way to get in on US poker when it's legal again.  Getting US players is priority number 1 for them, and they won't do anything to jeopardize that, and I'm sure their legal dept will tell them it will.  I'd love it if they did accept bitcoin though.

So you'd say tough luck to them but to people irresponsible enough to lose their coins, zomg we need to reclaim them!  GTFO GMAA and don't touch my emergency savings account.  If only 1 bitcoin is left, you know what will happen, everybody will agree to add more decimal places, so nobody loses any value, but amounts small enough to be used can be used.  THAT's how loss of coins gets solved.  Ain't nobody gonna ever agree to add into the protocol a way for them to lose their own coins without their consent.  Fuck.. that... shit.

You guys have a namecoin address?

Looking to sell 40-50 bitcoins in Las Vegas.  PM me or post here if interested.

I can't login to the site, and I just did a DNS lookup and it said the site wasn't registered.