The more interesting takeaway from this is:

1) The U.S. Supreme Court is telling banks they must give access to Argentina's assets stored in their banks.
2) Bitcoin can be used by countries just as easily as it can by individuals to protect wealth from seizure.

If Argentina so decided, it could transfer all assets to Bitcoin and there is nothing their creditors could do, short of war (sending forces in to seize the private keys), to collect.

I'll be more specific in my answer:  The IRS.

I've been analyzing further.  When we hit the vertical stage of the adoption S curve, rate of adoption will go exponential.  Metcalfe will go super-exponential at that point, along with price.

Good call.

We have now hit an all time high for Bitcoin adoption, and it looks to continue its upward trend.  As you can see, Bitcoin's price is heavily correlated with the Metcalfe's Law value of Unique Addresses ^2.  I see no signs of this correlation changing, nor of adoption slowing.  This implies a continuation of the exponential rise in Bitcoin's price.  Sometimes adoption leads price, and sometimes price leads adoption.  You can see this if you analyze the long-term trend in the top chart.  At this point it looks like adoption is going to lead price.



Here is the chart zoomed into the right side of the chart for better analysis:


Edit: Updated 9/8/2014 with latest data.

If you folks like this idea, can we get it pushed through to a core dev.

The mining app should give whatever data is available through getblocktemplate to a Bitcoin client.  That client should check it and tell the mining app if the block looks acceptable for mining.  Each client can implement the check however it sees fit.  But the interface offered by the client to mining apps should be standardized.

What would be the next step here?  What is the process for getting this idea before those who design standardized client functionality?

I really like that.

Typical Bitcoin.  Up 50 points and it's going to the moon.  Down 50 points and Bitcoin is dead.  Certainly you've been around long enough to see this?  The worse the gloom, the bigger the bounce will be.

On the contrary, that would result in a huge influx of capital into Bitcoin.  That's the opposite of black swan.  For those who'd rather stay on the down low, you always have the option of using exchanges outside the U.S.

I'd give you a beer, but all my coins are in cold storage...

Well, that depends Professor.  Do you live in California?
http://www.sacbee.com/2014/06/10/6473631/california-teacher-tenure-firing.html

We haven't made any new lows here.  I'm not sure what you're complaining about.  My own analysis shows we could go down as low as 420 before the exponential rise.  Any lower and then I start to worry.

The new mining protocol is already implemented.  We need to design the client interface that mining apps will use.

It's the latter.  But the mining app still needs a standard way to compare against the data in the blockchain.  We want this to work the same on all Bitcoin clients.  Then the miner simply runs a Bitcoin client, the mining app, and points the app to the pool and client.  And voila, no more double spends being hashed by miners connecting to a pool.  This protects against a pool operator directing his pool of miners to hash his double spend attempts.

No.  Hold.

No, that's the old getwork mining protocol.  What we're discussing here is the newer getblocktemplate protocol.  Please read more about it here: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Getblocktemplate.  What we need in addition to this is a way for mining apps to check the blockchain and compare against the current block.