Yeah, they are always so proud of their official GPD growth numbers going up at about 8% per year, but recently it's come out that they have been quietly inflating their currency base at about 4% per year since 2003.  Considering GDP is more accurately a measure of Gross Consumer Spending, such a revealation not only cuts the knees off of the idea of a decoupled China boom, it also means that their adjusted GDP is barely beyond their middle class population growth.  That is a doubling rate about every 16 years, BTW.  Even the target rate of inflation used by the European Central Bank of 2% has a doubling rate of about every 33 years.  But I'm not really sure which is worse, because China still has a growing middle class population, which would actually mitigate some of the effects of inflation by reason of a growing domestic demand.  Europe, on the other hand, has a static or falling middle class population rate; so even a 2% inflation rate under such predictitable demographics is a destructive number.

I sent them an email about four days ago, I have had no response.

The US should never have been an empire to start with.  I would say that the end of the US empire is a good thing in the long run, but we live in the short run.  It will be a better nation for those who survive the short run, even if the federal union fails and states break apart.  The best state to live in under such a breakup is probably Texas.  I'm probably too old to see the end of such a conflict, myself, and would just bail on the whole nation and retire to some English speaking third world country.

Bitcoins are a scam, I'll buy you out for a 50% loss.

Considering how private an individual Satoshi seems to be, I wonder what the odds are that he is another 12 year old hacker genius like DVD Jon; and his father won't let him interact too deeply with the crazy American crypto-geeks without parental oversight.

Of course, by now he would probably be 14.

You could consider bitcoins as part of the sale price.  In the same way that appliances and window dressings are negotiable, so is the actual trade currency.  Beyond what is required to pay the note, anyway.  On your regular ad, just put a little blurb about "alternative currencies will be considered".  Your more likely to get a mixed offer with Euros, precious metal, or a vehicle than bitcoins; but there is no reason to be picky.

Considering that there are only about 4 million bitcoins in circulation at this time, I doubt that anyone has 500K bitcoins.

And a server setup to compare 10K GPS grid numbers and their vectors at a time.

Simple right?  Probably not, or these other apps would have hit the public by now.  Granted, these other guys are trying to compare destinations as well as some other issues, and might have trouble with the transfer payment laws across borders.  All that I'm asking for is a client that can tell the server "I'm Joe Sixpack, I'm trying to get (downtown|WalMart|Atlanta, Georgia|Burning Man), I'm willing to offer x.y bitcoins per mile to get me as far as you will take me, and I'm not a psycho" and then the server forward that message to the client of the driver who is approaching the GPS location of the rider and is traveling in the general direction of the rider's goal.  Future improvements to such an electronic thumb would likely come later if the principle is sound; for example, a peer rating system might prove valuable.  As in, "this guy never paid me for the trip|he said I have a perty mouth|he paid me in grade A toke" kind of peer ratings.

It doesn't matter, build the app, and they will come. 

That's another good reason for a Bitcoin based app, as opposed to some $ based transfer system.

There are several phone apps in development intended to permit a rider to hitch with a driver for a near-real-time rideshare, such as Avego Shared Transport, RideNow and Flinc.mobi.  All of these systems assume a transfer of funds from rider to driver electronicly.  All of these systems use GPS mapping to match riders with drivers in complex ways.  None of these systems are publicly live.

Could any of you android developers hack together an app that simply notifies drivers headed in your general direction along the road that you are standing at of your destination and an offer in bitcoins?

So what we need is an extension to the client that permits the import and export of keypairs to a standardized file format, that could then be sent to anyone in any other way that files can be transfered.  The export process should automaticly assign the keypair the desired amount of money and destroy it from the wallet, while the import process should automaticly transfer the funds to a new keypair and destroy the keypair.  This would also permit long term storage of funds in the like maner for the same person in such a way that the exported keypair did not need to ever be accesable from the internet, nor stored with an entire wallet.dat backup.  It could be encrypted by PGP and sent over email, or loaded onto a floppy and stored in a saftey deposit box.  For that matter, it could even be printed onto a paper hardcopy with the 2D scancode format and placed into a  firesafe.

We live in barbaric times.

That's another way of calling it a currency.

I thing this whole attempt to boil Bitcoin down to a soundbite is futile at best, and potentially counterproductive.  Bitcoin doesn't require advocacy.  That will either lead to a bubble or to the early notice of governments.  Tell your freinds and family what you found, tell them what you think that Bitcoin is, and let them decide for themselves.  Get on with your own Bitcoin economy and stop trying to "talk your book".

Except for the little fact that Bitcoin is a currency by design and definition, and the act of attempting to deny that fact in the face of reality is a fraud.  Don't fall into that trap, if they want to lock you up for using bitcions, lying about it will only make it easier for them.

That's a great idea, but how would the receiver ever be certain that the wallet was unique without the need to immediately transfer the funds away from the wallet, destroy the wallet, and transfer them back?

No, not guaranteed.  Not even likely.  The difficulty would adjust in short order, and they would, at best, be left with collecting the new coins for as long as they were willing to commit the resources to the endeavor.  I seriously doubt that they would consider it worth it for long.

However, if they were willing to commit the entire thing to generation of bitcoins for a short time immediately after a difficulty adjustment, ram through the generation as fast as they can, and then stop as the difficulty adjusted so high that it took an hour or more to find a single block solution; then they could dick with the network for a very long time.  But this could also be done by any group of people willing to act in collusion to the same end.  Still, this would only frustrate the network for as long as they were willing to keep it up, but never break it.

A more dangerous attack would be to secretly use such a supercomputer to build a false blockchain before the whole of the network can develop a total network power in excess of what something like this could achieve.  Which is why anyone who has a computer that idles most of the time should donate clocktime to generation, regardless of their personal odds of grabing a block.

It was bound to happen.

Well, it's mathmaticly impossible for everyone to have a 'secure' government job.  Protesting, striking and rioting is a result of the belief that the government is the primary source of wealth, and it is only by the greed of the elite that said wealth isn't distributed evenly.  There is an old saying in America (and I suspect elsewhere) "there is no such thing as a free lunch".  It means that, even if something is free to you, someone has to pay for it.  In the case of the French, the government gets the money to pay for public largesse from taxing it's own people.  It's a vicious circle, and the strikers are harming the lower classes for the 'right' of living off of the younger working classes for a difference of two years.

This is also why you will not see the same kinds of striking in the US, because once we are out in the streets it's going to be bloody. 

That just means that we need to adapt the teaching methods to the audience.

I think that part of your problem is that MtGox (and other markets) don't leave a publicly accessable record of the negotiations.