I certainly DON'T think automatic weapons should be sold in an totally anonymous, unregulated market. That's just me. I respect other opinions, there are certainly grey areas in everything.

After reading the quoted text, I didn't feel it was worth my time to click the link. Yet, for some reason I did feel it was worth my time to comment.

In my defense, I'm only human! 

For those who like the idea of Bitcoin but are disturbed by the fraud artists who ply their trade with impunity, there are several choices to consider:

1) Stick with means of value storage and exchange backed by traditional, more-or-less reasonable and predictable legal systems, where the keeping of one’s word is encouraged using the threat of draconian punishment.  However, legal systems which meet the “reasonable” and “predictable” conditions specified here are growing rather thin on the ground. So quite a few people are sure to remain interested in the alternatives below:

2) Build electronic systems based on Bitcoin (or other decentralized electronic cash) which incorporate “web of trust” mathematics.  Perhaps this could even be done in some especially-elegant manner, where a Bitcoin in the possession of a widely-trusted individual is actually worth more “units of value” than one owned by a newly-created or disgraced account holder.  Study the theory of Secure Multi-Party Computation. Perhaps a low-tech inspiration for this kind of thing could be Hawala, a word-of-mouth banking system successfully used in the Islamic world since the 8th century – and which no modern country has been able to suppress, despite plentiful reasons to try.

3) Build electronic systems based on Bitcoin (or other decentralized electronic cash) which scarcely require you to trust anyone at all – just the same as Bitcoin itself.  The weak link here is the connection between the world of of electronic currency and real-world physical goods (and traditional money.)  Possible solutions here include mechanical delivery systems, perhaps controlled by multiple parties: dead drops, “geocaches” or even autonomous flying machines:

…Or: Bitcoin users could ignore the above, as I’m quite certain they will, and happily carry on signing up for “banks” and “stock exchanges” run by take-the-money-and-run artists. And steadily cement the reputation of the system as a sad joke. And on the positive side, a few die-hard activists might thus avoid facing the firing squad.  Using Bitcoin will become its own punishment, the way sniffing glue is.  But the down-side is that we won’t learn just what sort of world is possible given a functioning, decentralized cryptocurrency (perhaps an interesting, albeit somewhat macabre one.  Or possibly a somewhat boring one: something like a more consumer-friendly version of the world organized criminals presently live in – the world of Swiss numbered bank accounts and airborne luggage trunks full of diamonds.)

There's a whole nest of people just waiting to hear about Bitcoin, salivating at the prospect of not having their accounts blocked.  Sounds like an untapped market to me...

http://www.paypalsucks.com/
http://www.screw-paypal.com/
http://www.aboutpaypal.org/
http://www.paypalwarning.com/
http://www.customerservicescoreboard.com/PayPal
Etc, etc...

Also, BitInstant, if you're reading this... buy advertising on those sites! 

but it does look like users occasionally get partitioned off into "Azureus island" or "rtorrent island" or "everybody else's island."

Why? What would such a bot do? I know HFT bots exist on regular stock and currency exchange markets but they are exploiting very specific issues. Debt issued on a P2P bond market still has to be issued for some kind of purpose and under some kind of identity so you can have confidence you'll get it back.

Oh, and someone thank him for making an observation but offering no solution. Thousands of people die of starvation every day, apparently food sucks.

All my comments are directed at the quoted text, I didn't bother to click the link.

BitInstant fees are way too high especially if you are trying to buy thousands of dollars worth of BTC.

For the avergae person, the current purchasing methods are just a pain the arse. Even as an "educated user", I don't buy coins because it is a pain in the arse to set up.

3 options to do something without as much risk as GLBSE:

1 - Setup a proper incorporated company, get all government licensing etc - this may not be popular in these parts, but it's actually perhaps the best way to avoid unwelcome regulatory attention - appease rather than fight

2 - Setup a tor hidden service - this makes things a lot more shady-looking, and also means the service can't be trusted by investors either (you could disappear without being tracked down, taking everyone's funds with you)

3 - Some kind of P2P setup - this could possibly be done using an alternate blockchain where each unit is a share, the problem is that the semantics of mining don't quite make sense - you'd have to buy "blank" shares from a mined block and that would cost money - which defeats the purpose of fundraising - there's probably a more clever way to handle this problem but it'll require a lot of thought

Actually, there is a small incentive to forward transactions:

If you mine a block that contains a lot of transactions that have never been broadcast on the network, it will take your peers longer to verify that the signatures in the block are valid.*

So it takes your block longer to propagate through the network, which makes it slightly more likely to lose a block race.

The URIs can be dynamic, just like all other content in the web.  It can be a different address on every page load, or order, or whatever.

GLBSE is dead, finished, fini, it has issued it's last stock. It was released of it's earthenly bonds. In fact, it is an ex-change.

That is exactly what we are working towards at BitPay.  eventually the bitcoin address will be invisible, just like all the IP headers and other things we used to have to deal with when sending emails.