Mt. Gox has been ignoring my requests as well after providing:

0) Reasonably complex password
1) Dwolla
2) BTC balance
3) I had prior communication with Mt. Gox before the crash.

After my initial good experience (#3), I must say that I will never use Mt. Gox again.  He has effectively robbed me of $192.

I prototyped an exchange before abandoning the idea due to legal concerns.   My plan to 'compete' with Mt. Gox was to 'auto-magically' arbitrage between our two sites anytime the price difference was greater than Mt. Gox's fee.  I would charge a much lower fee to cause people to switch to my site, but make money on any price differences between the two sites.  This would give the new, 'smaller' site a larger 'volume potential' than Mt. Gox because it would represent the sum total of all of my customers plus all of Mt. Gox's. 

In a free market this kind of arbitrage is possible by any new entrant and would quickly undermine any even marginally profitable exchange.  Ultimately, all exchanges would end up performing this kind of brokering for their customers.

A standardized inter-exchange bid transfer system would help, but is not necessary.

Erm... what bank does that? The dollar is not "backed by gold" and niether is the Pound or the Euro. I don't think any currency is backed by gold anymore, world economy outgrew the stuff.

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They did not "outgrow" the stuff, they "defaulted" on contractual obligations because they committed fraud by printing receipts for gold that did not exist and giving them to people in exchange for a promise to repay with real "gold" plus interest.

With bitcoins you cannot have an IOU 1 BTC masquerading as a real BTC.  In order to borrow BTC the lender must actually have BTC. 

If I rent a house for 1 year, it would be fraud for me to 'sublease' it for 2 years.  A checking/savings account is like the bank renting a hotel room for one night, knowing that the hotel owner (customers depositing money at the bank) could sell the room to someone else the next day (withdraw on demand).  The Bank commits fraud when it turn sublets the rooms (deposits) for longer than 1 day.

So people are right to be outraged at the current financial system because it is entirely based upon legalized fraud.
 

The issue is that creating an IOU 1 gold coin is very different than "I have one gold bar in storage, here is the claim note".

There is nothing magical about "creating IOUs out of thin air", the fraud occurs when the bank issues warehouse notes out of thin air.  The two have VERY different market values.  One depends upon the credit of the loan issuer (ability to repay) and the other depends upon trust of the warehouse not to 'steal'. 

When a bank issues an IOU gold on demand in exchange for an IOU gold in 30 years mortgage they commit fraud unless they actually have claim to physical gold.     Removing physical gold from the process is irrelevant.

The proof of the fraud of the current banking system is that you could *never* implement it with bitcoin.  Sure a bank could issue its own currency that it will 'redeem' in bitcoins, but the value of that currency would float against real bitcoins.    The benefit of bitcoins is that they are 'effecient' enough not to require a bank to hold physical assets and implement 'wire' transfers.

If there were a way to verify donations made to a candidate then you could pay american citizens to make donations.

I suspect that many people who would support Paul do not because they do not want to end up on a "list" that gets published.  Many others do not care about the "list", but have no money.   

Solution:  make a donation, get a receipt, get reimbursed via bitcoin and keep a small percent.

If mining contracts were priced in $USD then price the money earned by mining is fixed and the risk is shifted to the speculator.

How is the price-per-share calculated and how often does it change?

This whole problem can be resolved with proper short selling.

Miner borrows bitcoins in advance, sells them at today's profitable price, and then pays them back with newly generated BTC.  This transfers the risk from currency flux to difficulty flux.   Unfortunately, the primary time difficulty goes up is when price goes up.  So if you short coins and lock in todays price, the price goes up causing difficulty to follow then you end up having a hard time paying off your BTC debt.

The relationship between difficulty and price means that if you are mining bitcoins you must speculate that their value will go up over time because there is no "safe" way to short BTC and hedge difficulty increases.

Perhaps if a pool operator offered a contract for a fixed price per work item.  Then you could short or go long on difficulty adjustments. 

Miner would then look at the current price for a 1,3 or 6 month mining contract @ fixed difficulty to determine profitability.  They would then buy the contract and short the BTC thus locking in the "unknowns" and transferring the profit/loss from BTC price/difficulty adjustments to speculators.

With these factors in place, the market should automatically smooth out all such "sudden" disturbances.

What does anyone have to gain by DOS bitcoin sites?  DOS attacks are not "cheap" are they?

Would it not be better to make the transaction fee user-setable instead of "programmatically" set?  Have we not already established that these transactions are perfectly valid without a fee, they just may take longer to get processed.

This way the price discovery of the transaction fee is moved into the app developers instead of the Bitcoin source code.

I am interested in feedback from the community on what they would like to see.

Goals:
1) Enable people to lend bitcoins backed by $USD
2) Enable people to lend $USD backed by bitcoins

Proposal:
1) 3rd party holds both the $USD and the BTC and automatically covers the loan when margin runs out.
2) All loans are on Certificate of Desposit type basis with no borrowing short term lending long term.
3) Individual lenders may choose the interest rate and margin requirements.

Expected Results:
1) Bitcoin market becomes more liquid
2) Reduced volatility, price spikes result in short selling, price drops result in covering.
3) Establishing a market interest rate for BTC backed by USD and USD backed by BTC.
4) Finally a way to earn a return on your BTC savings. 

Questions:
1) What interest rates and margin requirements would you offer for lending your BTC or USD?
2) What interest rates and margin requirements would you borrow $USD or BTC?
3) Anyone interested in starting a bounty for such a service?  Perhaps someone trusted by the forum (not me), could hold it?