Excellent points. It would be nice to hear an official statement from BitPay, Paysius, and BitWallet.

I love the fees. You should try, too.

There are at least two problems with this statement.

1. BFL might never ship, or by the time they do the competition might have made their technology irrelevant

2. There will be no "more BTC generated," as network adjusts difficulty every 2016 blocks to maintain an average of 10 blocks generated per hour, or 150 coins mined per hour.  If BFL ever ships, much like any other vendor their shipments will gradually start arriving to miners over weeks and months - assembly, testing, shipping, customs, holidays, etc.

You comment would only make sense in the universe where BFL rigs magically show up in everybody's homes on the same day and start hashing, while most of GPUs, FPGA, and ASICMINER and Avalon ASICs mysteriously stop hashing at the same moment. Even then, BFL rigs would only manage to mine for a few days before they cause difficulty to jump)...

You could use mining rigs to dry the leaves.

In other words, OP is saying that the support has been increasing ~10% per 2-3 month rally.

I'm saying it's more like ~100%, and will continue to do so until it doesn't. It will all make sense in hindsight

Education. I don't mean bullshit university degree (I speak as a PhD), but practical knowledge and skills, specialized or not, from a university course or from somewhere else, does not matter.
Another one: physical excercise. No need for expensive gym memberships and props, all you need to invest is your time. Time is money. And, speaking of investing time, another great investment: friends and family.

If your concern is that people handling your coins might scam you, simply do what is prudent: get in touch with your business partner, learn their name, look them up, ask around. Don't rely on the community to do this in an organized fashion you are proposing here. If you find serious red flags, please do share the facts and let others decide. Case in point: scammer Sonny from Butterfly Labs.
Letting everyone do their due dilligence is much better than relying on one private eye do it once, for a variety of reasons.

If your concern is that a developer might have some skeletons in the closet, and therefore subject to being blackmailed to introduce exploitable bugs, then your background check is pointless. Let's say you find out that Biggrogobulux, one of main developers, was arrested for theft as a teenager, or was investigated for credit-card fraud. This is not a kind of secret that would make him do anything just to keep it secret. It's already public information, that's how these investigators get it for you and serve it on the plate with the bill. You might be more interested to check whether Biggrogobulux has been banging his high-school sweetheart behind his wife's back for the past three years. Case in point: David Petraeus of CIA. Private investigators you are thinking of do not dig that deep. Besides, such information is too precious to trust a random internet guy would not sell it up (or give it up) to a third party that might be interested in exploiting it. You'd have to do background check on people running the background check. See the problem? This is kind of shit presidents have to deal with all the time.

Which means it is in BFL's best interest to make products that emit deadly exhaust fumes. Which explains their obsession with fans.

If Ripple is found useful by the masses, it will be used. Users will need to obtain XRP to push transactions. As long as they are comfortable with the cost of transaction fee, I don't care where they got the XRP from (50% chance it's from OpenCoin if they keep their promise of giving away 50%). All this does not affect me as a user - whether it's bitcoin miners, or Ripple developers, or my bank executives. If I am happy with the free choice I can make, and the cost of transacting, and the security, and level of privacy or transparency, and social and environmental implications of the system, and any externalized cost they create - as long as I'm happy, I don't care who pockets the fee. In fact, I'm glad it's kind of folks behind OpenCoin.

To most people "scam" does not mean what you think it means.

What edd said. Look up on blockchain.info or blockexplorer.com the transaction ID or the receiving address from your mtgox history.

OP raises an interesting point. Why pay mining fees, when you can perform off-chain transactions?  One way to answer this is: because off-chain transactions inevitably involve some cost and some risk. Paying a transaction fee to the miner may be cheaper, faster, and more secure than performing an off-chain transaction. This "may be" is what will create a competitive market that defines the fees depending on particular payer's needs.

I don't care that it is closed-source, I care that at the same time on their Website they claim it is open-source. That's ugly, and it's hard for me to take them seriously.

No. We are helping him spend money on SatoshiDice:
https://blockexplorer.com/address/1ASPjmoFbsLq6rxtaXen3Whapbd9jSGvMo

Did you get the confirmation email from friedcat a month or two ago, with this address and balance according to GLBSE data?

True. It is important to see this statement in the light of the fact  that currently there are twice as many bitcoins as there were in June 2011.

I don't see how investment firms could "crash the price" as described in OP, but I do see how this latest development may lead to bitcoin becoming more of a speculative vehicle, and less of a trading currency or secure long-term investment. Wild fluctuation in price - in either direction - is disruptive. Oh, well. Not really bad news, but not quite what I was hoping for.

This thread is just precious. Keep it coming!

Think again, harder.