Am I the only one who still doesn't get it? Why don't billionaires buy a crapload of BTC elsewhere for 800$ elsewhere and sell them for 900$ on mtgox?? To me it sounds like an almost instant 12.5% profit with a 6 week payout time?
Do we expect mtgox to take the money and run?

With billion dollar buyouts happening all the time in techland they should have kept with Bitcoin long enough and leveraged the checkout process for storefronts like Paypal offer merchants an alternative to 2% payouts.  Basically paypal without the credit cards and therefore less chargebacks for them and no fees.  They could have classified virtual currency trades differently and had HIGHER fees for them and the community would have stuck with them.  

I think they could have raised their tiny fee 8x (for over $100 transactions) and the Bitcoiners would have kept using them.  They could have also mandated higher/longer holdbacks on Bitcoin sellers and implemented some simple anti fraud actions to make it all be profitable for them.  Highly profitable.  

They then could have sold for multi-billion dollars to Google.  Easily.  

OK, so a bunch of people get together and launch a currency.  They create a wallet which has a .conf file containing some initial nodes which, presumably, correspond to hosts under their control.  They make the wallet available for download.

People start to use it and their software discovers other nodes which it stores in peers.dat.  Is that correct?

Now, let us assume that the developers then abandon that currency and over time stop running nodes on the hosts listed in the .conf file.

If I have this right in my mind, those with wallets already created can continue with transactions (because their software has already discovered and recorded other nodes) but someone downloading and installing the software from scratch wouldn't be able to get started because the nodes in the .conf file no longer exist.

So unless someone else decided to "take over" (in a figurative sense) and update the software then over time you'd get very few new users.