This is great (without the flare effect): the coin looks like 1000 °C

Please send me the psd file to boussac.75011 at gmail.com, preferably under DWTFYW license  

IMHO it's quite possible to improve the bitcoin protocol incrementally through BIPs.
There is no such thing as web 2.0 in spite of the marketing hype so why would we need bitcoin 2.0 ?

Isn't this similar with dollar bills or any fiduciary form of money ?

In a one-dollar transaction paid with a 100-dollar bill, we see 199 dollar units changing hands. It could be a 99 dollar tx (in smaller denominations) and a 100 dollar tx : no one could tell in the macro economics statistics of velocity, only the parties privy to the transaction.

L'interview radio RMLL sur bitcoin (7 minutes, format .ogg) à télécharger et rediffuser !

It could be that the economic and social conditions in Switzerland are vastly different from what they are in Detroit or South Central LA..
In an affluent, homogeneous neighborhood with police protection, why would the place be unsafe ?
I'd be interested in seeing statistics pointing to an absence of correlation between gun detention rates and crime rates, that is statistics taking into account economic and social conditions.

Why do you anticipate a difficulty increase with reward halving in december ? Unless the BTC price doubles, I would anticipate the opposite, miners dropping out.
Only FPGAs and ASICS will cause a (gradual) difficulty increase but we may not see it until mid 2013.
Right now, difficulty is below were it was a year ago.

Non, il y a parfois des sujets triviaux sur ce forum mais la situation Apple/Bitcoin n'est pas anodine.
Une entreprise qui vend des produits au grand public ne peut pas faire n'importe quoi, donc je réfléchis à une façon de riposter et j'engage tous les bitcoiners à le faire.
Un développeur d'application mobile en France aujourd'hui ne peut pas faire l'impasse sur les 10 millions de porteurs d'iphones.

Most economic "experts" in the media are computer illiterate and do not even know precisely how a payment system works (let alone the internet or bitcoin).

As a result they are mesmerized by bitcoin as a new "libertarian" currency and fail to see that it is most and foremost "money over ip".

Let's build bitcoin as a new payment processing network and will see how things unfold for bitcoin as a currency 

Je n'aurai pas de problème si Apple admettait explicitement qu'ils interdisent paytunia pour favoriser itunes ou je ne sais quelle solution de paiement qu'ils sont en train de préparer.
Ou même si, comme tu dis, ils admettaient qu'ils laissent entrer qui ils veulent, arbitrairement.

J'ai un problème quand Apple dit au développeur qu'il doit trouver lui-même la loi qui justifie l'interdiction prononcée par Apple !
Pas de justification vaudrait mieux qu'un justification comme celle-là.

Elle est sous-titrée en français sur Youtube: cliques le bouton "cc" en bas à droite de l'écran et choisis français dans la liste déroulante.

Ce serait bien d'avoir un doublage aussi..

@OP

I am skeptical about the EMV part.
In Europe, a POS terminal must be PCI PED compliant, meaning neither Visa/Mastercard nor any bank will allow the POS to install a new module, specially a bitcoin module.

The implication is that the merchant needs to get a separate, openpay-enabled POS terminal and hook it up to her checkout system (expensive proposition) OR ask a value add reseller to install the OpenPay module in the existing POS (also an expensive proposition).

Therefore I fail to see where this scenario improves on the merchant simply integrating a bitcoin acceptance feature (essentially currency, conversion, QR code display) on said checkout system.

What I do see is the user experience of a customer carrying the card you describe: if the merchant is equipped with the openpay-enabled POS (that the big if) the customer can make a partial redemption of his bitcoin balance to settle his purchase transaction, then reload his card as needed.

In a nutshell, the card makes sense only if you can get "free" access to the POS terminal.
A project that entails having merchants putting money in yet another POS terminal or another POS software is doomed to wait a long a time before gaining a large acceptance.

Businesses will accept to use the bitcoin network through payment service providers (PSPs) that abstract out for them its complexities such as block chain hosting, transaction confirmations, currency conversion, cash out, etc.
I believe bitcoin PSPs (including Paymium) will start gaining traction before the end of the year.

Futures are a fraud like a Ponzi scheme.
Futures allow people to sell something they do not own.
They go against the notion of basic property rights or the notion of common goods.
The only difference is a Ponzi is illegal while futures are a "legal "fraud.

Why are futures "legal", unlike a Ponzi ?
Reason number one is: unlike a ban on Ponzi where there is an organizer making promises, it is practically impossible to enforce a ban on futures in any given country.
Reason number two: futures benefit the big producer to the detriment of the small producer. For instance, unlike the small producer, the big wheat producer is equipped to store the wheat safely in large quantities. Big producers have the clout with lawmakers to keep futures legal.
Now , because it is "legal", one has every right to trade futures.

One last word, the claim that futures are good for liquidity is questionable. Sustainable liquidity is achieved through real trade of actual goods and services creating volume of transactions.
Futures create short term liquidity but the cure can kill the patient. Liquidity through futures is like an athlete on steroid.

None. Futures are a very bad idea. They give people the impression that bitcoin is just a toy for speculators.
Market makers do not require futures to provide reasonable liquidity.

Futures on Brent ? You mean selling oil that I don't own ? Oil that has not been extracted yet perhaps ?
If people keep on speculating on oil prices, they will kill the oceans.
People will drill deeper and deeper to the point where they can't fix a deep water oil leakage in less than 6 months: that's already started. Oil is a common good (or evil) that should not be subject to speculation.

It's just another LETS like thousands of others around the world.
Trouble is they probably never heard of bitcoin as a technology so they are using the good old central ledger.
That works for 800 users though..

Meanwhile I have had our paytunia mobile app translated in greek (for android phones).

Bump

Why most people don't get bitcoin is because bitcoin is presented mostly as a new kind of money (which it is).

Money is a complex topic loaded with lots of cultural bias: this kind of terrain is often hostile for innovations.

If bitcoin is presented as a new internet technology for transaction processing (which it is also), acceptance is facilitated.
Obvious benefits can be outlined in comparison to legacy banking systems a la PayPal.

Only then, when the merits of the technology and network are understood and field tested, can we hope to win people over a new currency system.

The euro was successfully introduced in Europe in this manner: it circulated first (between 1999 and 2002) as a meta-currency in parallel with national currencies. Only in 2002 when people felt it was proven, the euro became a full fledged currency with retail prices expressed in euro.

I know this sounds ironic today with the current circumstances prevailing in Europe.

This must be actual footage of his presentation at the CIA HQ last year 

Very interesting.
I am wondering how much this could expand the reach of bitcoin while maintaining a high level of security.
Then again, they say everybody is only 20 social relationships away from Barack Obama