Bingo!  With all the talk that the weekend brings a drop in prices due to ACH transfers not being processed, my thesis is that everyone has staged money for the weekend in order to take advantage of the drop.  Therefore, I bought today, just ahead of this weekend's surge.      ...only time will tell if my thesis is correct.

I had an idea for a way that vulnerabilities associated with peoples wallets could be discovered and reported to users...write a virus or trojan that attempts to recover someone's private keys, but doesn't actually remove them from the machine...instead, have it use one of the private keys in the wallet (or all of them) to sign a report of the vulnerability.  Then post that report in a well known location along with the bitcoin addresses that are potentially exposed.  The report should be encrypted such that only the exposed private keys can be used to decrypt the report (so as not to let the world know about someone's vulnerability).  A utility could be used to monitor such reports coming in and alert a user if one of their addresses has been exposed.  A person, having had the vulnerability discovered and warned would then be expected to send a tip to an address included in the report (not sure what an appropriate tip would be, but perhaps a social convention for an amount could be established and noted in the report).  People could earn bitcoins off tips and even gain some recognition for being the one that helped prevent the theft of the most bitcoins.

I went out and bought 15 lawnmowers today.

Or it could be someone drawing interesting patterns on bitcoin monitor to draw out the conspiracy theories. 

I had the same problem...I see in the responses that they seem to be using an anti-DDOS service called blacklotus.net.  I'm guessing the fact that I was polling on a regular interval (1 min), I was flagged as being DDOS like traffic.  From the same machine I can connect from a browser with no problem.  I've emailed them about it (I'm imagine I could craft the headers to mimic the browser and work around it...and maybe randomize the interval of the request to avoid getting flagged again, but I'm hoping mtgox might have a better suggestion for me).

I had the same question...I may want to adopt this approach myself, but I don't know of an easy way to export/import a transaction.  If such a feature existed, you could generate and export the transaction to a file, copy to USB, and import/broadcast with another connected bitcoin client.  I imagine you could copy the block chain files from a connected client over to the air gapped machine via USB so that the wallet sees the current balance.

It would be nice to add a few features to the client to facilitate this scenario.  It would also be nice if the client supported "receive-only" wallets that have no private keys...this way you could make a "receive-only" copy of a wallet, load that up on a connected client and be able to monitor the balance of your air-gapped, savings wallet without risk of the coins being stolen.

But what do you mean by parity?  If you mean the price of BTC in dollars is equivalent to the price of an oz of gold in dollars, that's rather meaningless.  Or, do you mean when the value of all gold in the world is equivalent to the value of all bitcoins?  Now, that is meaningful, but also not likely to happen very soon...but, you could pick a target ratio of the value of all bitcoins in existence to all gold in existence.  That would measure the usage of bitcoin relative the usage of gold.

Scheduled downtime is the only argument I can see for not trading 24x7.  Perhaps if the various exchanges do adopt regularly scheduled downtimes, they can do it at different times so that there is always trading available at any time of the day.

On the other hand, with the proper architecture, there should be no real reason for scheduled downtimes.

Trying to panic the bitcoin market is a dangerous game.  That appears to be a game played by someone yesterday.  For those that panicked and sold yesterday, I hope that you weren't risking more on bitcoin than is prudent at this stage of development.  I also hope you are able to recognize it for what it really is: someone or a group trying to manipulate the market to their advantage or scare people away from bitcoin. 

If you were panicked out, I hope that you will re-assess the amount of risk you're willing to take on bitcoin and, if you still desire, are able to recover some or all of the position you lost before the price rebounds.

Trying to manipulate a digital commodity a dangerous game for would-be manipulators.  If panic was your objective, you may well have succeeded, but the market will learn and adapt from this.  In the future, panic might not be so easily achieved and you may spend a lot to try and generate a panic and fall well short of your goal.

A digital commodity like bitcoin is a far different animal than a physical commodity where most of the trading is in various derivative paper contracts (due to the obvious cost of taking physical possession).  With paper derivatives, a lot of firepower can be brought to bear on the market with relatively little capital.  Since it is possible and cost effective to take possession of bitcoins, people will want to take possession of them.  This means that naked shorting (in all it's various forms) will be nearly impossible with bitcoin (perhaps on very, very minuscule time frames).  So inducing a panic will be a very capital intensive affair...and when the market becomes more educated in this area, it will be the market the takes advantage of the people trying to create panic.

The approach I took when I entered the market was to define the portion of my portfolio and monthly earnings that I wanted to risk on bitcoin (knowing that it's still in its infancy and many things could still go wrong).  My strategy was to dollar cost average into bitcoins until I built my target position and then begin trading around that position.  I have not yet built my target position and thus I have not yet started trading on the sell side.  Bitcoins at $15 are far more appealing to me than $30 (which incidentally is about where they were 8 days ago...where will they be 8 days from now?  $50?  or $5?).  It's like there's promotional 2 for 1 sale going on.  

A whole lot of people are working on the infrastructure of bitcoin...there is no doubt about that.  In due time, it will become much more user friendly.

Bitcoin is certainly not good to use as a pricing mechanism right now, but that doesn't take away from its utility as a medium of exchange and store of value (the one week speculative bubble and pop notwithstanding).

You do realize that the FED is also a private bank, right?  (with a facade of public oversight)

It is simply because most people don't understand what money really is...look at the history of every major innovation that has ever happened...it doesn't surprise me at all that many people don't get it, or that many people are even hostile toward it.  It's to be expected.

Tell that to the person that lost the bitcoin 

Actually, a single bitcoin would be worth *exactly* $1,000,000 when a satoshi is worth 1 penny.

This analysis is flawed.  The key to understanding why is in understanding that banks, when they lease gold or silver, they aren't actually leasing gold and silver.  They are leasing paper contracts for gold and silver.  Physical commodities are inconvenient and costly to deal with and that's precisely what makes them vulnerable to this sort of manipulation.  If banks actually delivered the physical gold and silver, this sort of manipulation would be near impossible to carry out successfully in a time frame of any consequence (indeed, even with paper substitutes, on a long enough time frame, it's impossible because people eventually come to recognize the fraud).  In fact, it's the inconvenience of holding physical commodities that led to fractional reserving banking in the first place.

Now, ask yourself this, if you were trading in bitcoins and you leased them from someone, is there any circumstance under which you would accept a paper contract for those bitcoins rather than the bitcoins themselves?  Maybe there is, in which case the market manipulation you describe might be enabled, but I rather suspect people would rather have actual bitcoins under their control.

These threads trying to talk or panic the market down don't work and are getting rather annoying.  You're wasting your time.

It's not a problem at all: first, bitcoins can be subdivided infinitely, 8 decimal places is just an artifact of the current protocol...if everyone was dealing with ever smaller fractions of bitcoins, it wouldn't be a hard sell to get everyone to agree to upgrade the protocol and shift the decimal point...it would just need to be organized, well tested and planned out far in advance.  A lot bitcoin means that you lose one bitcoin of wealth and that wealth transfers to all other holders of bitcoins (in the form of making their bitcoins ever so slightly more valuable due to a now smaller supply).  This is a beautiful thing compared with a fiat currency where a lost bill transfers wealth from you to the central bank (and from there to the initial recipients of newly issued fiat currency).

You apparently have not bothered to search the forums much, because if you had, you'd realize that it's all been discussed and considered at great length.  Banks may be threatened by bitcoin at first, until a few of them realize the enormous potential bitcoin has to offer even them (and they also realize the folly in trying to resist what is truly a great innovation).  Such banks will prosper mightily and show the others a path forward.  Many of your points about the perils of deflation (also discussed ad nauseum) are invalid and only relevant in the context a debt backed fiat currency.  Bitcoin likely won't replace national currencies or even central banks, but instead be an important alternative vehicle for savings and commerce.  Much like gold and silver offer an important alternative (and one which at the end of the day, keeps governments in check from a fiscal perspective).  Bitcoin is a digital commodity currency and that is a great innovation that is hard to under estimate.  It makes it possible to have private, cash like transactions on the internet and will ultimately solve a lot of the problems we have with fraud and identity theft (which cost everyone an enormous amount of money every year).

People are right to despise the banks...their relationship with governments has not exactly been for the benefit of the people, but bitcoin or no bitcoin, people are awakening to that situation and it will get resolved one way or another.  If bitcoin were to cease existence tomorrow that eventuality would not change.  I believe bitcoin will survive an attack by the banks (if it happens), the question is whether banks can adapt for the future, because those that cannot, will surely perish.

Maybe in the longer term people would lose faith in the dollar because of a fear that the "full faith and credit of the US" that backs the dollar is no longer worth much.  But, in the short term, it is definitely deflationary.  There would be a scramble for dollars that would make the Lehman collapse look like child's play.  This is why I think the printing press will continue to be used.