With bitcoin, there is a more-or-less constant overall rate of mining new coins (per individual miner, the rate is dependent on the number of fellow miners, but overall, the rate is constant)...this is different from gold in the sense that more people mining gold yields higher rates of overall gold production and fewer miners yields lower rates of production overall.  I'm not sure what difference this makes.  It may mean that since the overall rate of production doesn't vary with the price (as it does with gold), the mining activity doesn't have any natural moderating affects on bitcoin price volatility.  As the price of bitcoin falls, the reduction in miners doesn't reduce the net new bitcoins being introduced.  Similarly, as the price rises, the increase in miners doesn't increase the rate of new bitcoins indroduced.  In this respect, I think it is different from gold mining.  I wonder whether it would have been better to have made the reward for finding a block to vary with the difficulty (having a higher reward when difficulty is higher, and lower when it's lower) and have the ratio of reward to difficultly decline toward zero over time.  This would mean that you wouldn't have a fixed upper bound on the total number of bitcoins produced, but mining activity might have a more moderating affect on the price of bitcoins.

Gold was valuable as jewelry only because it was rare...if gold was scattered all over our yards like dirt, we'd have given it no more thought than that which we give mud when we wipe it off our shoes.

I don't know if I agree with the premise of the original post...that bitcoin cannot survive without a lot of vendors accepting it for goods and services.  It's rare to find vendors willing to accept gold or silver coins for goods and services and yet there is a well established market for both gold and silver.  Bitcoins offer a great many benefits when used as a medium of exchange, but bitcoins also offer a great many benefits as a unit of account and (hopefully) as a store of value.  I think their value as a unit of account and store of value must be well proven before they'll be widely used as a medium of exchange for goods and services.  And, it's possible that they may never be widely used for your average day to day transactions, just as gold and silver aren't widely used for that purpose.

Don't get me wrong, I think lots of vendors offering goods and services in exchange for bitcoins would be a great thing.  I just don't think that necessarily has to happen for bitcoins to be successful.  I think the most important aspect of the bitcoin experiment is that you can create a p2p digital money system without any central governing authority and which isn't vulnerable to plundering by such central authority.  No one needs to accept anything other than other forms of money for that experiment to be successful.

Now, one thing that I've thought would be cool is if some of the checkout services (Amazon, Google, etc) would start enabling third party currency exchangers.  This would let someone like me offer a service that allows people to pay with bitcoins and I would perform the currency exchange into dollars or whatever else the vendor accepted.  The vendor would only need to deal with the checkout services and get paid in their favorite currency.  The purchaser would be able to pay via the checkout service with their favorite currency (including bitcoin).  And I would handle the currency exchange.  That would open up a whole world of goods and services available for purchase using bitcoins.

ClearCoin with some modifications could provide a service such as this...it could do it multiple ways...if ClearCoin doesn't trust the payer, then they must first have a clear coin account with confirmed funds in it...if ClearCoin does trust you, then ClearCoin is taking on the double spend risk any time you want to buy something.  The payee trusts that ClearCoin won't double spend and accepts its payments instantly.  I think this solution is far better than complicating (and possibly compromising) the underlying bitcoin protocol.  For many people, the risk of a double spend will still be so low that they won't even use the trusted third party service.  They'll just accept the transactions immediately upon broadcast. 

I guess I just don't see a big issue with this in the current system.

Exactly, and it's a problem that is better solved with a trusted third party IMO.  I think all of the proposals on this thread still have an element of time that must pass before you can really consider a transaction to be firmly embedded in history.  And, what is interesting is that the very nature of double spending involves the passage of time.  The only way to ensure that a double spend has not occurred is to wait some period of time until you are confident that you are still well connected to the real network and that no double spends have been attempted.  You can gain a degree of such confidence with the existing network by staying well connected and listening for double spends even before a new block has been generated.

I think what it comes down to are a few simple choices:
a) accept a transaction immediately and not worry about the potential for a double spend
b) wait a period of time for confirmation blocks
c) use a trusted third party to clear transactions instantly

For transactions of relatively small amounts, the effort required to double spend isn't worth it hence the occurrence should be small to non-existent.  Even accounting for some amount of fraud, this cost should be far cheaper than the transaction fees currently imposed by payment processors.

You might also want to make sure at least a couple people have printed out the block chain ...and the bitcoin source code  ...and the source code to at least one OS (i.e. Linux) ...BIOS source code ...chip microcode ...hardware schematics ...oh, and paper isn't very durable so you might need to inscribe everything in stone tablets buried in your back yard. 

I think this could also be done "out of band" so to speak...keep the core code around the peer and block block very clean and very simple.  A payer could for example sign a message incorporating a transaction ID and send that along via smtp or xmpp...if a payee wanted definitive proof that someone actually owned the account from which money originated, the payee could request the payer to somehow sign a token with the private key of the account (maybe also sign with their gpg key).  This could all be done in a nice and simple way in a bitcoin client without touching the core block chain code.

Is it really that hard to get them?  The local store near me has them for $599.  Although, I bought a second one the other day and they only had two left (not sure if they had more in the back).

A key characteristic of money is that it's divisible without loss of value.  Bitcoin is divisible (to 8 decimal places anyway).  It wouldn't matter to me if one bitcoin was $1 or $10,000.  The exchange rate is nothing more than a momentary point of reference.  What does matter to me is what the price of bitcoin was yesterday and what it will be tomorrow relative to what it is today.

So, to answer your question, if you showed me some new invention and it was really cheap, sure, I would buy it.  If it was really expensive, I would still buy 1/10000 of it.

When I first started looking into bitcoin, the only thing that I really cared about was the price history chart...but the values on the y-axis were irrelevant from my perspective.

I have to agree.  It's not so much the fact that the current code is in one gigantic file...it's that the the code being in one gigantic tends to encourage sloppy practices (not to say one can't write nicely factored code in one gigantic file).  Also, if you're ever going to get serious about unit tests, you'll need well factored code to facilitate testing all the various bits (and writing unit tests tends to force the issue of good factoring).

I took a look at that other refactoring effort.  In light of that, I think I may be better off not worrying about master branch adoption and just carry on ...adopting changes from the master branch as they happen.  The thought of trying to get things compiling on MSVC++ isn't very appealing to me.  I want to split up the ui, miner, peer and wallet and enhance what the wallet can do (automated encryption and backups, etc).  I also have some ideas about the UI to make it better for novices (and working with the native ObjC/Xcode will facilitate that).  I also would like each of these components to be able to be statically or dynamically linked via well defined, C based APIs.  And, I'd like them to each have standalone versions with google protocol buffers for communications.  Lot's of ideas, but need to focus on one or two for now.

Mac OSX 10.6.6.

What I don't get is why the exchange rate of BTC would have any affect at all on the adoption and growth of bitcoins.  They could be worth $0.10, $1, $10 or $1000 and I don't think it would make a difference.  But, I can see argument that exchange rate volatility is a hinderance to adoption and use.  If the price moves in large swings over short periods of time, people will be less confident in holding and using bitcoins in commerce.  And that is why we need lots of active BTC traders...people willing to buy as the price falls and unload as it rises in an effort to profit from the volatility (reducing volatility in the process).

What I meant was that the hoarders would have little (or less) incentive to sell as the price fell and that would create a floor under the value of bitcoins (rather than falling to a value of zero as an ealier post implied (based on what I considered a flawed argument that bitcoins have no intrinsic value)).

Not that I've found.  I'm in the process of refactoring the code (one h/cpp per class, etc).  I also grabbed googletest and plan to add a few unit tests to get the ball rolling.  The refactoring part might be a hinderance to adoption in the master branch (due to the large amount of change), but I do plan to keep it updated with the master.

Just so long as you can squeeze those MREs through the intertubes.

Some people posting on this thread seem to believe bitcoins have no intrinsic value.  That is simply not the case.  Bitcoins can be readily transferred electronically, mathematics and a widely distributed system of trust ensure their limited supply, transactions are pseudo-anonymous, they are impossible (practically speaking) to double spend.  It's incredulous to me that people could even imagine that bitcoins have no intrinsic value in the face of these facts.  It's true that if hoarders dumped their hoards on the market, the prices would fall, but certainly not to zero...and the hoarders would have little rational economic incentive to do that (I mean, it's not like a run on a bank...due to intrinsic value, it is more like a stock and as prices fall, they would find a natural level of support).

In fact, given these properties, one could argue that bitcoins have far greater intrinsic value than gold (which has similar intrinsic value, but is stuck in the physical world).

I prefer second (and second the motion for a poll).

Also, this gomockingbird tool looks great (first I've seen it).

Could you elaborate on or clarify this statement?  Are you in any way affiliated with Google the company and are you suggesting this is a project that is officially sponsored by Google?

I could be convinced of this position based on an argument that as long as market participants understand this is possible and understand the consequences (which is basically the momentary creation of fictitious shares in the market).  However, it's no good if the market participants operate under an assumption that people actually posses what it is they are offering for sale.  Also, it's worth mentioning that in current markets, naked shorting isn't something that is readily accessible to most market participants.