It doesn't show up on the bottom of every page?

You can buy anything that's on the site with Bitcoins.

Everything should work automatically but if you want something customized or if we need to do something special with regards to shipping we might have to handle the payment manually.

That seems reasonable

Exactly. It's an unrealized gain until you spend them.

It's still overhead. Eliminating the need for overhead will always be beneficial for the system as a whole.

There's very little capitalism going on in the world any more. Most of what people who dislike "capitalism" are objecting is more correctly called fascism or mercantilism.

Sometimes the simplest things can be the best. Asteroids, by Atari, came out way back in 1979. There's no doubt that Asteroids is a classic. Thousands of fans hail this game as the best of all time. Fundamentally about vectors, while superficially about rocks careening through space, Asteroids succeeds as a great game in spite of, or perhaps because of, its simplicity.

In Asteroids you pilot a spaceship mired in an asteroid belt. You must maneuver your craft about, spinning and shooting to avoid a deadly collision. Each time you shoot an asteroid it fragments, creating more smaller targets. Occasionally a flying saucer will enter the screen; gun it down for bonus points. Asteroids is a game that is easy to learn (even without a joystick) but is difficult to master.

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Exact exchange rate will be determined at the time of order.

Does anyone know how to pronounce that?

Actually growing the extra grain that will be required is adding a positive.

In your example you're correcting the misallocation of resources causes by imperfect information. If the knowledge of this upcoming shortage was widespread the farmers and the retailers and wholesalers would preemptively change their behavior just like you did and achieve the same result.

I'm not calling speculation wrong; I'm just pointing out that in an optimal economy it is not necessary so people who want to make a positive change will work towards making it unnecessary.

If you want to think of it another way consider it to be overhead. Some amount of overhead is always necessary but we all know that efficiency is improved by removing the need for it.

If you take every six letters of the King James Bible and XOR that string with the one formed by every nine letters then run the result through zlib compression the resulting binary sequence will be the UTF-8 representation of, "May the sauce be with you. Ramen." repeated 42 times.

You're still talking about negative economics. At best speculation removes a negative rather than adds a positive.

An ideal system would not need any speculation therefore if you want to improve the system you should move it closer to the ideal state.

At some point I plan to make a cron job that updates the exchange rate every five minutes or so automatically. Eventually the volatility will go down if more people start using Bitcoin to buy and sell things rather than speculating.

It's entirely neutral - neither adding nor subtracting wealth from the economy. All it does is move it from one person to another person. Wealth is only added when someone in the world increases his output.
I believe that we are in agreement.

Exactly. A person wanting to gain wealth has three ways to do so:

1) Do more work
2) Do more productive work
3) Get wealth from someone else

Option 3 isn't necessarily immoral or illegal (receiving charity is an example, so is winning a bet) but it certainly isn't sustainable for everybody to do it.

If you want to improve your own economic situation and build a better society focus on 1 and 2 and forget about 3. (hint: speculation on stocks or currencies is not 1 or 2)

Over the years Karl Denninger has done a good job of pointing out all the opportunities Ron Paul has had to make a real difference but has so far passed on.

Who manages the main website?

I'd like to suggest adding this link to the Community section: http://www.meetup.com/BitcoinCryptocurrency/ as a way of promoting the currency and helping people find other interested individuals near them.

The exchange price is entirely determined by what people are willing to pay at a given moment and nothing else.

Hopefully you don't mean any of the professional economists that told everybody that "subprime is contained".

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You most certainly are not. All you're doing is fueling a speculative mania even further.

You can do everyone a favor by convincing them to sell whatever idle productive capability they have for Bitcoins. That's where economic benefits actually derive from. Getting rich from currency speculation is a zero-sum game.

If you want to increase your personal wealth without taking it from someone else you either need to do more work or more productive work. Bitcoin helps with this because it allows people to sell their skills in situations that would be impossible or unprofitable in other currencies which means they can increase their personal economic output.