I've read speculation that in the event that one or more countries default and/or exit the eurozone, the USD's value might rise in the short term, as capital flows from euros to USD.  

But how would this affect the exchange rate of gold to USD?

Would unemployed Europeans find themselves selling gold to pay for living expenses, driving the price of gold down?   Would a short-term stronger USD also drive the price of gold even lower?

If you wanted gold, would you wait or buy now?

Several threads have entertained the notion of an island community build around a Bitcoin economy.  This project might be of interest:

/r/redditisland is a reddit community in the process of purchasing a private island to start a new reddit community. As we get closer to making it a reality, a few things have come up like currency. It seems to be between hard currency and something like BitCoin.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/ueui4/question_about_very_large_bitcoin_transactions/

I've seen suggested a few times that stores offer customers promotional rebates of bitbill (or some other form of a physical private key).

From the perspective of a merchant, the likely return on investment seems small.  Many customers would simply disregard and promptly dispose of their bitbills.

So I suggest printing a bitbill with an expiration date.  The merchant would retain the private key.  After a period of time, if the coins have not been spent, they could be reclaimed by the merchant.  The financial cost of the promotion should be greatly reduced.

Rear casing is cracked. Looking for $600 OBO.

http://newyork.craigslist.org/que/mob/2786475537.html

Would be willing to ship if paying it bitcoins.

I have two lots:

• Cards from 2009-2011 http://cgi.ebay.com/Magic-Gathering-444-card-FOIL-lot-2009-2011-/320733310700
  
• Cards from 2004-2008 http://cgi.ebay.com/Magic-Gathering-594-card-FOIL-lot-2004-2008-/320733311475
  

10% discount off sale price for paying in Bitcoins, current MtGox exchange rate at time of payment

I have a 5870 in my Mac Pro1,1.  I tried out DiabloMiner.app in 10.6 Snow Leopard, which yielded an average of 140MH/s.

After an upgrade to 10.7 Lion, I now see an average of 273MH/s.

I'm not exactly sure why the change appears so drastic.  Perhaps it was an upgrade to the ATI drivers and/or OpenCL framework.  Or perhaps 10.7's UI is just much more efficient with its use of the GPU for acceleration.  (Java version is still 1.6)

Either way, it was a welcome bump in my mining efforts.   But I think perhaps it could still perform better by booting into Ubuntu.