I don't know if it's funny, or annoying, the way people keep forgetting that when you exchange currency, such as Bitcoin into USD, or USD into whatever currency is being proposed here, the currency being exchanged doesn't just disappear. When you quickly exchange out of BTC into USD to avoid currency fluctuations, someone else is buying and holding that BTC, exposing themselves to the fluctuation risk. Likewise, with your proposed idea, when you buy this Bitcoin 2.0 with USD, someone else ends up with your USD. So, basically what you are proposing is gifting a few lucky exchange operators with $21,000,000, totally free of charge, and then making the rest of us give them our hard earned USD for the privilege of using their special freely obtained $21,000,000 worth of BTC.

Even you yourself later point out that "without somebody to take the other side of the trade, your BTC isn't worth anything," so why even propose something like this?

^^^^

"I made up this currency which I'm calling 'stable'. My friends and I are selling it for $21,000,000USD. Anyone interested in buying it? We take whatever currency our method you'll offer, as long as you give us $21,000,000 for it. We also need some other people to keep hashing blocks to secure it for us, and can't guarantee that it will be secure until enough people are hashing. Now, I know we said we have $21,000,000 worth of it that we are selling, and it's only only worth that much because we say so, but please don't all rush in to buy it all at once. There's plenty for everyone."

All our technology has been internalized in the past, and I don't see that changing in the future. What I mean is that if we figure out how to make thinking machines, we will use them for personal implants/augmentation first before we use it for any standalone entities. So in the end, we will be the intelligent, super-smart, all knowing beings with wired brains, just as we used to be calculator carrying beings, and are now beings with connected smartphones and access to Google and Wikipedia. Any AI will simply be a tool to make ourselves better.

That's pretty much how they do it there. Charging interest is a sin, so they use the same interest formulas to figure out how much the loan is worth, and charge a one time fee instead. So a $100 10% interest loan just becomes a $100 loan with a $10 fee. Same for houses; instead of giving you a $100,000 %5 loan and collecting $193,000 over the years, they just give you a $100,000 loan and expect you to pay back a loan fee of $93,000, or sell a $100,000 house for $193,000. By calling it a fee instead of interest they get around the issue, with the exact same end result. Religion is funny that way sometimes.

I disagree. The instructions only make it seem way more complicated than it actually is. Since I already had my bitcoin configured for remote access (server=1 with login and password), all I had to do was download p2pool and cgminer, and then run p2pool and cgminer with option parameters copy/pasted from instructions (suggest they include those options in .bat files for Windows users). Downloading and running two files isn't all that complicated.

I'm also very glad switching has forced me to try cgminer. I used to use GUI Miner, since I'm not too tech savvy, but that involved manually testing the overclocking limits of my GPUs, then running Sapphire TRIXX to manually overclock my cards every time I wanted to mine, and deal with coming home to a locked up computer if my cards accidentally overheated. With cgminer, my overclocking is done automatically, and it monitors my temperatures and controls fan speeds and such for me. I just run a .bat file to start it, and forget about it. Despite my average hashing speed being about 20 to 40Mhash higher than before, I haven't had a mining related system lockup in a week, where as they were fairly common with GUI miner.

 Problem is there aren't many alternatives to flying. In some situations, there aren't any at all.

Just as fyi, I was trying to tackle this problem from a financial/lender point of view last summer, trying to figure out how loans and interest can even be calculated in a deflationary economy. The solution we came up with is a formula similar to the current Present Value of Annuity formula (example of it switched to calculate payments here http://www.financeformulas.net/Loan_Payment_Formula.html) that all lenders use to calculate term/interest/payment amounts, though a bit more complex. In summary, instead of you paying the same amount every month as you do with mortgages and car loans now, your payments would be heavily frontloaded, with the first payment being rather large, and each month's consecutive payment decreasing until the final comparably tiny payment. From the perspective of the lender, they get back the same amount of value they would get had they invested the bitcoin at the same interest they lent it out at, plus the deflationary value growth of bitcoin. From the borrower point of view, even though each month's payment is a different number, after bitcoin deflation is taken into account, the actual value of the payment remains the same.
Hope that made sense.

If you can stuff a pile of dirt and garbage into a replicator bot and have it spit out another replicator bot almost free, private ownership won't be a problem. Things like energy and resources for those robots will still be scarce (rare-earth metals are called that for a reason, and will always be rare, no matter how well RBE and its  "lack of scarcity" is established), but I guess the conclusion I'm coming to is that the type of lifestyle hyped by RBE acolytes may come about without the RBE groups' input or help, making those groups irrelevant. A worse thought is that those of the RBE movements already foresee the coming technological change, and are hoping to hijack it for their own ideological reasons. But there's no way the RBE groups could be that dastardly and evil, is there? (Am I giving them too much credit?)

Atlas. Unremoursefully.

Is "Having strange odors" one of those 7?

Seriously, though, could this open a door to a Bitcoin debit card that doesn't look suspicious, but still gives you cash-like anonymity?

I was really hoping that after the underwear bomber we would all have to remove our pants, but, alas, technology killed that dream.

Here's a thought: thanks to being able to easily transfer and copy digital content, a poor person can have the exact same stuff as a rich person without costing anyone anything. For example, owning a library of over 1000 movies used to be something you'd think only millionaires could have. Now, legally or illegally, pretty much anyone can have that if they wish.
The newest entrant in technology that will likely explode in 2012 or 2013 is affordable home 3D printing. I think this technology will follow the same path as our digital media, with people freely exchanging item templates, and illegally sharing exclusive things only wealthy people used to be able to afford, making possession of items as distributed and "equal" as digital content is now. Once we start scavenging landfills for raw materials like metals and plastics for builder bots that can recycle materials, even homeless people will be able to print themselves things we used to think of as luxuries.
In this scenario, a beneficial electronic all controlling "diety" that uses "science" to tell us (force us) how to act will be just as needed and relevant as it would be now for the current internet. (I fully expect any such controlling computer, no matter how well meaning, will be heavily DDOSed by groups like Anonymous, too.)

TL;DR - If thanks to replicator bots the physical products go the same route as the digitals have, there won't have to be a global collective change in thinking and society. The end result may be similar to what RBE is hoping for, even without their help, but our culture and money will likely remain the same.

I still like the idea of cgminer p2pool integration. If joining was as easy as running your bitcoin software and just starting cgminer with -p2pool option, a lot more people would join, especially newbies, since starting one program with one option is way simpler than signing up on a pool web page and setting up custom configuration on a miner to connect to it. As far as I understand it, everything the miner and p2oool need to work (bitcoin address, localhost) it can already grab automatically from your own system.

Calling Bitcoin a business = FAIL

Nope, just in America. Other countries I traveled to don't give a shit.

This looks cooler   (sarcasm) http://www.amazon.com/Victorinox-Swiss-Army-SwissChamp-XAVT/dp/B000QGF986

I think it's the high variability. There were times when I got nothing for two days, or 0.07btc, and once I got 0.49btc. I also got two 0.01 subsidy payments. I'm hoping over the course of a week/ month it will average be the same as what I get on a regular pool. (550mhash here)

I found out about them after I moved. My reason for moving were low mining fees and distributed mining as opposed to centralization, so bonuses are  a plus. (Only other low interest pool I knew of was Eligius, and I didn't want to be there)

They've been pretty open and honest about all the crap they've gone through before, so I expect they would give an explanation if it was something that broke on their end. It could also just be someone dumping a whole bunch of coins on the market, and the automatic trading bots going haywire, trying to outbuy and outsell each other, causing the price to wildly oscillate.

May be too early, since I suspect most coins bought now are used for long-term storage, so without them circulating around the advertising will be wasted.