Well, if you want a new Mercedes Benz or something like that, then you will need to buy it in the old economy.  However, I could envision a resourceful agorist buying an old clunker with some national currency and restoring it to like new condition and then selling it for Bitcoins.  When you register the car, which would already have a title, you would only have to pay taxes on its old, unrestored value. 

In the future, there will be a greater availability of desktop manufacturing devices and eventually molecular manufacturing machines, so the percentage of the world economy that can be delivered digitally is only going to increase.

sgornick, why not sell Visa gift cards on BiddingPond?  Is there a premium?

When you consider that, if successful, Bitcoin will have the world's most powerful special interests (governments and banks) arrayed against it, it is not unreasonable to make self-defense planning a top priority.  I think there should be an active group dedicated to thinking up "what if" scenarios, war gaming, development of alternative network topologies, etc.  In my view, P2P cryptocurrency is the most significant freedom-promoting development in our lifetimes, other than the internet itself.  Those who control their money control their destiny.  It will very likely accelerate the demise of the old-school hierarchical institutions (government and large corporations), but not without them waging an epic battle.  Things could get quite interesting in the next 10 years.  I agree with RHorning that the most significant threat is legislative, but the agorists among us are already itching to see large portions of the economy go underground.  The time is now to develop a sizable following for Bitcoin, especially among liberty-minded folks who will stick with us even if it becomes illegal to do so.

Actually, she's the most intelligent person I've ever met and did indeed understand what I was talking about.  At any rate, could I compile bitcoind to run on a MIPS-based router?  I have an ASUS RT-N16 running DD-WRT sitting on my cable modem.  If not, I'll just slap together a reasonably low power x86 Linux box.

OMG, I was just talking to my girlfriend about how nice it would be to have a WP e-Commerce-compatible processor for Bitcoin.  I can't wait to test this out.  Does bitcoind need to be running on the server that the site is hosted on?  That wouldn't be possible in my case as it's a shared server.  Keep up the good work, Mike!

The amount of computing power being thrown at mining is increasing exponentially (see attached graph).