It's not necessary for one person to put up money to buy out the whole market...lot's of individuals with smaller amounts would do that as the price creeps lower.  The floor price is set by the demand for coins for facilitating commerce (which we know is not much right now).  Anything above that floor represents savings demand (aka speculation).

Here are some wild guess about what is needed for actual commerce today.  If you assume 10,000 people wanted to retain $100 worth in bitcoin just to have on hand for spending, then the implied price of bitcoin would be $0.13.  If 100,000 people wanted have $100 spending money, or 10,000 wanted to have $1,000 in spending money, then the implied price is $1.30.  $100 seems like a reasonable bare minimum that someone interested in using bitcoin for commerce would want to have on hand for spending.  Currently, I'd guesstimate that the fundamental value of bitcoin is definitely less than $1 and probably less than $0.25.  Everything above that reflects the savings (speculation) demand.  Of course, if actual commerce with bitcoin slows down, then the fundamental value could fall as well.  And, inflation is always eating away at the price.

One area of commerce that I've found bitcoin to be particularly convenient is paying for software related services (programming, website design, logos, graphics, etc).  I think if someone put together a nice site focused on software development related services where people could offer their talents in exchange for bitcoin, it might help get some more commerce going.

It might also have something to do with the fact that it's difficult to turn helium into coins that are easily traded and stored.

+1

Founder, I really wish you would study this topic a bit deeper until you understand what evoorhees and others here are trying to tell you.  The price of a bitcoin multiplied by the number of bitcoins mined tells you zilch about anything.  Trying putting up 10,000 bitcoins for sale and see what that does to the price of a bitcoin and your "total value of the bitcoin economy" figure.  I imagine that would be sufficient to push the price of a bitcoin to below $1, in which case you have to ask yourself where the other $10+ million of value went if all you collected was less than $30k and the total economy is then worth only about $7million.

You are correct that the continued generation of coins will put downward pressure on the price of bitcoin.  If there's no growth in the use of bitcoin then short of another speculative bubble, the price of bitcoin will continue to fall.  You can flexbank on it, so plan accordingly.

As for rebooting bitcoin...it's already been done at least a half a dozen times...see the alternative crypto currencies section of this forum.  There, you'll find a graveyard of reboot attempts.

There is nothing wrong with the bitcoin generation function (and there's nothing particularly magic about it either).  The only thing that was wrong were expectations about how quickly people would start using bitcoin or what price was necessary to support real economic activity using bitcoin (which I think is probably well below $1).  I think even the run up to dollar parity was almost purely speculation.  If you think of it in terms of a stock P/E ratio, it's like bitcoin was trading at a 300x multiple and it simply didn't have the growth rate to justify that...and now it's falling back to a much more modest and appropriate P/E ratio.

What if a client made it so that you could change the desired rate of block creation?  Wouldn't that be the only thing you'd need a client to support?  If you set it to 1 second instead of 10 minutes, then the difficulty shouldn't rise above 1 and all other code can work unchanged (thus making the test mode as realistic as possible while making it easy to generate blocks).

Slight tangent.
While this may be true of python, it is not true of high level languages in general.  For example, the squeak VM (squeak.org) is written entirely in Smalltalk.  It is translated into C code, then from there to machine code.  However, had the authors had the time or inclination, they could have bypassed C altogether to translated straight to machine code.  Whether you can do this in any particular language is a function of how complete and well designed that language is...it's not any inherent limitation of high level languages in general.

I'm sure you could find a way around that...for example, you could create one file per bitcoin block and store the full content of the bitcoin block in that file (including transactions).  For accessing individual transactions, you could use file system links (filename is the tx id) that point to the block in which the transaction appears.  Having the block chain easily accessible via the file system and small command line utilities to do things with it would be quite useful.  That's not to say there isn't also place for using a DB.

Gavin, have you abandoned any effort to utilize Stefan's bitcoinjs/nodejs stuff for this testing framework?

I think this is a good idea...removing BDB and going with a git style content addressable, file based store should be a good fit for bitcoin.  And it shouldn't take anywhere near a year to do it.  I also prefer well written C code over C++.

Has anyone else filed for trademark in the US?  At this point, I think that would be a good idea.

Actually, I think the best outcome would be if mtgox applied for and was rejected the trademark.  That would establish a clear ruling in the court systems that bitcoin cannot be trademarked and is free for anyone to use.  I would hope that mtgox would recognize that this is the best possible outcome and would be supportive of efforts to oppose the trademark.

It's too bad you don't have some casascius coins to take with you...it would have been good to try and buy things *other than dollars* with those coins (a cup of coffee from someone, a newspaper, anything you might need or want while you're there).  Some of the more curious people might be willing to obtain and then trade such things with you in exchange for the casascius coins (and a card point to bitcoin info).

And for the home schooled?  And what about private schools?  Who gets to "force" who?  What weapons are they allowed to use to apply this "force"?  Everyone has their own opinions about education (what is taught, how it's taught, how it's managed, etc).  State run schools create a situation where people are artificially forced to reach some consensus where there might be at times legitimate disagreement.  Sometimes people need to be allowed their space to avoid violent conflict.  If people had more choice regarding schools or could recover their tax dollars to put it toward private alternatives, it would ease some of this conflict.

I would simply like our governments to be more persuasive and less coersive.

A bit over the top, I admit.  

So, if a child isn't being taught state approved material, how far would you be willing to go to force the parents to comply?  Would you take the children from their parents?  Would you imprison or kill them if they resisted?  That's my point.

I think we would do well to have less state interference in eduction rather than more.  The current state controlled system is certainly not working very well.  We don't have to worry that the best ideas will thrive, they always do and we should err on the side of solutions that don't require the use of authoritarian power.

Yep, Ritchie was a great one.  I just realized I've misplaced my K&R C book...wanted to crack it open for a little nostalgia.

(I don't understand the hating on Steve Jobs though...Ritchie was little known outside of computer science circles...it's not surprising he wouldn't get as much attention)

So, I guess you get to decide what is taught to children then?  I suppose you are fully prepared to take people's children away and kill their parents to impose your world view as well?  Sorry, but I don't want to live in your murderous and totalitarian world.

PS.  I find it ironic that you seem to support state controlled education and use religious teachings as your justification for it.  It's ironic because were it not for the lobbying of religious institutions in the mid 1800s in the US, we might not have a statist education system today.  Religious organizations lobbied heavily to impose a state run education system precisely because they could use it to force their teachings on people.

I agree with evoorhees here...you might not like what someone else is teaching their kids, but they have to be free to teach it too them.  This is where crazy ideas (like the world is round) come from.  If we allow a monoculture around education to develop, we all lose.  In a private system, the vast majority of people will put their kids through some accredited and conformist education because that's the path of least resistance to developing the tools needed to be successful.  But we need those alternative perspectives as well...every once in a while, they yield something that truly changes the world for the better.

Nice!  I like how they promote mining as a way to earn the coins needed to enter tournaments.

My guess (based on this thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=46498.0), is that someone is trying to prove a point about difficulty adjustments.

Merchants (and really anyone using bitcoin) have a strong incentive to get transactions into the hands of many miners...if this ever became a real problem, they could take steps to ensure their nodes remain well connected with miners and relay transactions to them...others could ensure they maintain good connections with those merchant nodes that ensure transactions are relayed.  It seems like it's such an easy issue to work around, and there's such a strong incentive to work around it, that it would be pretty pointless for miners to engage in this behavior.  I'm not sure it would be worth the time to code something special into the client for this.  (also, seeing how fast transactions propagate through the network, I think a few miners engaging in this behavior would have almost no effect)

Some of the consumer protections that credit card issuers provide are desirable for certain types of transactions.  Just because such consumer protections aren't commonplace with bitcoin transactions today doesn't mean that they won't be in the future.  And the great thing about providing consumer protection in a bitcoin context is that you can do it without having any of the issues associated with stolen credit cards (which I would guess is responsible for the vast majority of credit card charge reversals).

Bitcoin is a solid and simple transaction construct on which many different types of transactions can be crafted.  It's much more difficult to take a reversible transaction and build an irreversible construct on top of it.