Of course, but the activity of non speculators is not sufficient to support current valuation or anything even close to it; even more so now that Silk Road has gone which did give Bitcoin some unique  utility in terms of accessing that market.

This would be they guy from the investment bank that would have gone bankrupt had its counterparties not been bailed out by the state?

Divisibility is not really a tie -- I doubt I could cut a Maple Leaf in half with a chisel and sell the halves as easily as the whole.  Also gold has too much value to carry small payments easily -- the dusting of gold would be too easily lost.  And in practice the minimum value transfer amount is some function of the cost to validate that the gold is not counterfeit.

I tell people this:
Human technological progress is the story of tools that progress from the use of natural substances with desirable (and undesirable) properties to engineered solutions highly optimized to the problem. The stone axe becomes the bronze then steel axe and finally the chainsaw.

Gold/silver is the natural substance that best meets the properties of ideal money. Fiat currencies are engineered as perfect money but are unsound because they have no guaranteed scarcity. Bitcoin is the first engineered sound money, with the best properties of scarcity, divisibility, portability, transferability, and verifiability of any known currency. 

Count me in.  If there is a way to make this provably fair it will garner more participation.

If you use a password to create a private key it is very easy for computers to generate the private keys and check the balance.  You need to create the private keys randomly and not from a password.  In other words, no brain wallets.  people can run large supercomputers and check passwords all day long so don't even try it.

the best way to go is use a deterministic wallet like armory or electrum.  that was you have one long key you have to save and back up.  Then all your addresses are created from that.