There are a couple web wallets, such as mybitcoin and instawallet.  You have to trust them to hold your coins for you, though.

There's no reason that credit and debit cards couldn't use bitcoins as their underlying currency instead of fiat.  You'd just have to get payment processors and merchants on board.

To some extent, yes.  They don't need to bank on the long-term prospects of bitcoin though.  If they're seriously bearish, they could just exchange their coins for fiat immediately whenever they complete a transaction.  As long as bitcoin is around long enough for them to turn a profit on whatever work they put into setting their businesses up to accept the transactions, they'll be fine.  Even if that doesn't happen, they lose very little as compared to someone who spends thousands on buying bitcoins in hopes that the price will increase over the long term.


I don't personally need a software dev.  I meant that the bitcoin community needs them. 

If you're looking for work, check out the marketplace section of the forum.  You can advertise your services (once you get out of newbie purgatory), and there are occasionally people seeking devs there that you can reply to via private message.

I'm optimistic about bitcoin, but I advise you to go with your gut.  Wait and see.  We don't need more investors anyway, we need merchants and software developers.

Yes, that does work.  The pools are all running the headless version of the bitcoin client, along with some other software.

Buying with Paypal probably won't be worth it for you, assuming you can even find a seller.  You've got no reputation (eBay account aside), and it's still difficult for people who've already established some rep around here to buy with Paypal.  Your best bet is probably to just sign up with Dwolla and use that to send money to Mt Gox or Tradehill.  Be aware that this process will take about a week (possibly longer).  You have to verify your bank account with Dwolla first, and then do an ACH transfer, both of which are slowed down by your bank.  Once the money is actually in your Dwolla account, getting it to Mt Gox should take less than 24 hours (I haven't tried Tradehill).

That's odd.  Mine is a bit under 450 MB, and that includes some relatively large logfiles as well.

You need access to the internet and the bitcoin network to ensure that coins aren't being double-spent.  Besides, there's no actual "coins" per se, it's just a big distributed list of addresses and balances.

You could print a private key from a bitcoin wallet and hand it to someone, but they'd need to spend the coins from it immediately, since they don't know who else might have had access to it.  The BitBills concept is the best we're likely to get for physical bitcoins.