no... he's not being a douche ... I happen to be a good coder, and I wouldn't consider building anything of any significance for even $500 ... Getting code done right is not an easy task... You have to start by answering all of the background questions, create a preliminary design, carefully considering what could go wrong and how the code could fail, then you have to write it, debug it, test it, ask people about it, etc.  Now, a crappy little makeshift, no guarantees piece of code is different. .. but even that would probably cost more than $500. .. It depends on just what he has in mind, but it can take hours of time just to communicate with him regarding exactly what he wants, cause to begin with, we'll probably find out that reality is going to put a cramp on what he/she wants and force some adjustments. .. Good coders make a lot of money doing stuff for people with money.  (usually.... not always)

As a complexity theorist, I recognised the significance of bitcoin almost immediately. Bitcoin is a superior medium of exchange to what we have been using.

1: Enforcement of anti-counterfeit rules is built in.
2: No central control means that the intelligence of the market rules, and it is a difficult medium to be abused by elites.
3: Freedom and inexpensive exchange
4: Math says that currency monopoly is unhealthy, so there needs to be competition in currency.
5: Designed to reward the early adopter.
6: Bitcoin mining with opencl is cool.
7: Bitcoin mathematics is at its foundation beautifully conceived. Rather than using policemens guns to enforce the nature of the currency, mathematical and computational law do that naturally.
8: There are complaints that bitcoin has no inherent value... Believe it or not, this actually is an advantage because it bypasses one of the money-mongers primary strategies... They find ways to take the currency in use out of circulation (such as government decrees that no one is allowed to have gold) so that they can force people to use their junk shit vomit currencies.  For currencies with inherent value, it is difficult to impossible to replace them, so the public  winds up falling into their trap. Bitcoin is not that way.  It can not reasonably be stolen out of existence. In the worst case, they can just start a new bitcoin. 
9: The current system is shit, designed to make slaves of people, and its the responsibility of smart people everywhere to assert an evolution.

Ofcourse, BC has weaknesses as well. Everything does,  but that was not the question.

There may be some fears of running amuk with the fed. What about the fears of being controlled by a fraudulent government Built On Lies? .. Oh right... I forgot... it's only an apparent government..  Verify this by its own word in the u.s. code where it defines itself as a corporation (rather than a government).

http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode28/usc_sec_28_00003002----000-.html

a web site discussing the topic
http://www.serendipity.li/jsmill/us_corporation.htm

and a video documenting it in detail
http://www.powercrossing.com/index.html

But this is just the beginning of uncovering the lies and deceipt that the U.S. Fed is built upon.

The U.S. government leaders never file their oaths to the constitution, so there is no court record of them and the oaths can not be enforced, making them "de facto" officers. or officers with no genuine constitutional "de jure" authority. 

Try this one on for size.

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1944/hahn-bio.html

This page verifies that it has been known since 1938 that thorium is a fissionable material as discovered by Otto Hahn.  But that's not the interesting part... this is the interesting part:

1: Thorium is as plentiful and potentially as cheap as lead.
2: Thorium fission process can be turned off at will because it never goes super-critical
3: Thorium fission waste products are thousands of times safer than uranium fission waste products.
4: Thorium fission process can be used to dispose of uranium fission  waste products safely.
5: China is now building thorium reactors.

With all of this known since 1938, why the heck did we ever spend time and money developing uranium fission? 

Darn thorium fission.... its waste products can't be used to build nuclear bombs and threaten the entire planet with destruction and land ruined for thousands of years. That's the only reason anyone I know of could ever come up with, cause it seems to be the only plus of uranium fission.

And the next question is:  why didn't you ever hear about thorium fission? I'll let you answer that yourself, but I suspect when the U.S. public becomes fully aware of it, they will throw a wrench in the U.S. nuclear weapons manufacturing potential.

This is the kind of sh** the u.s. dollar is built on. It's all lies, manipulations, bubbles, violence, and you're supporting it if you don't support alternatives.