Then you should stop using bitcoins. You are a hypocrite statist who believes in anti-freedom. You have no business using market evolved money based on freedom and decentralization. This is what Ron Paul stands for, and this what bitcoiners should stand for aswell.

It has a very high value-to-weight ratio, thus making transactions much cheaper. It can be transmitted in different ways such as waves or physical data memory, and can survive long periods of time without inflating. In these regards, it beats all other forms of currency. Thoughts?

I will be unleashing an aggressive campaign against statism to enlighten your ilk about what you are ignorant about. Best beware, your beliefs will be smashed.

This is just a heads up.

Our current unregulated free markets are not fair. Prices fluctuate all the time. Free markets will create too much wealth for people. And when everybody is free, it becomes unregulated, and bad things can happen. This can't be. It's not fair for poor people. What we need is fair markets. In fair markets, a government body is established to determine a fair price for every good. Any reseller wanting to jack up prices is revoked from his license to sell things. In fair markets, the government is able to care for everyone, and able to squeeze productivity from everybody who can, without anyone becoming too rich. Life should be fair.

Is there something embedded in the genesis block that regulates difficulty? If not, then who decides difficulty, wouldn't a central authority (yikes) need to decide the difficulty level?

It seems so baffling to me, like asking where did the universe come from. But I'm intent on learning.

When I sign a transaction with my private key, how is the network prevented from finding out my private key? How can it verify that I signed it without knowing the private key used to sign it?

I'm mining 9Mhash/s using an Nvidia 9600GT.

Is this optimal or could it be better? I'm using poclbm.exe to mine

I just discovered this yesterday by accident, got interested in the concept, researched it some more, then when I understood the concept, I was shocked. SHOCKED. It is relatively simple yet genius. I spent all day today trying to figure out how to set it up, now I'm mining a solid 9Mhash / s. Is it normal to be this excited? This is practically history in the making. It is revolutionary.