The problem is that it's extremely hard to achieve user friendliness and strong security at the same time.  It might even be impossible. There seems to be a fundamental law that greater security must always come at the cost of less user friendliness.

The best compromise I can think of is a piece of hardware, perhaps a smartphone, used exclusively for bitcoin.  This device takes the user's fingerprint and a password before every transaction. It has an extremely restrictive firewall.  The advantage of using a separate device is that it's simple to use and the amateur user can't compromise system security by installing software from third parties.

Automatic wallet encryption is not very secure at all, because the trojan/virus only has to sit and wait for the next time the user sends some bitcoins for the unencrypted version to appear on the OS.  There is also the problem that modern operating systems are getting increasingly complex and who knows where cached copies of the unencrypted wallet might be hiding, even if the copy visible to the bitcoin client is encrypted?

Giving users a false sense of security is worse than no security.

The market will no doubt one day offer solutions for non-geek users, such as my example of the "bitphone". Demand for them will soar once there are a few highly publicised cases of bittheft.  I fear that the fear is what it will take for a decent product to emerge. Unfortunately that's the way humans work. They grossly underestimate the risk from events that have never occurred (yet).

Web of trust could solve this problem in a modified wiki.  Editors log in with a GPG signature and everybody sees their own version of the page.  Edits from people with a negative trust metric in your web of trust are ignored on your version.  Similarly, you can choose your edits to be censored from those people.

Still leaves the problem with what the public global page should censor. IMO the domain name owner should decide, not the community.

email addresses are as "real" as it gets for hardware agnostic freelancing air tramps.

The notion that a street address somehow increases legitimacy is absurd. These can be rented from virtual office companies just like email addresses.   

Not even Satoshi uses his meatspace identity. There are good reasons not to apart from dodging accountability. Why should we impose such an invasive requirement on traders?

What matters more than a meatspace identity is a persona that has a reputation to lose in the community, anonymous or otherwise.   

Evolved currencies do have two distinct types of value though, exchange value and non-currency value.  They were traded for their non-currency uses before they became currencies.  That places a limit on how far they can fall when people stop trusting them as currencies.

For a designed currency like Bitcoin that lower limit is close to zero.

Perhaps Bitcoins do have some value apart from exchange value, like novelty and collectability, but that value is negligible compared to the current market valuation.

When people start "abusing" the main chain for non-monetary transactions such as DNS assignments, and a thousand other creative uses that we can't even imagine right now, then Bitcoin will start gaining substantial non-currency value too.

Bitcoin could be really useful for the CIA one day because it's a good way to sneak money across borders without detection, eg. to pay informants in totalitarian regimes.

In private, the CIA and other secret services may be delighted by the new possibilities a tool like Bitcoin gives them, but that does not necessarily mean that the governments those secret services work for will endorse Bitcoin publicly.

Great idea.

Since obituaries only require a few tens of Bytes, maybe less if compressed, storing them in the Bitcoin main chain isn't very costly either.

I don't see how an alternative chain for obituaries will become popular, since people will always regard the main chain as the more trustworthy and durable alternative, and even if the cost of encoding an obituary in Bitcoin transactions amounts to $10 it's still a lot  less than a newspaper charges.

Obituaries should be digitally signed, by at least two signatories with a high rank in the deceased person's GPG web of trust.  Otherwise the system regards them as hoaxes.

Alternatively, the super-paranoid could use "dead man switch" obituaries.

One potential use of block chain obituaries would be anonymous life insurance. 

My guess is that London is the most optimal place in the world in terms of average air/train fare paid by conference visitor.

Not only in places with an abundance of energy, also at times with an abundance of energy.

Making energy is the easy part, getting the energy to the place where it is needed at the time it is needed is what makes most alternative energy sources uncompetitive compared to oil.

The nice thing about Bitcoin is that you can take generation to where and when the energy is being made rather than the other way around. There are very few applications like that.

Therefore, market forces will ensure that Bitcoin generation makes use of energy that few other applications can use. In many cases, it will be energy that would have gone to waste anyhow, for example, surplus output from wind farms during very windy nights.

The chief developer, Satoshi Nakamoto, arleady has dropped out, and the value did not plummet.

It didn't matter because the bulk of the work had already been done and Gavin is just doing the fine tuning now.

I remember it was only about 9 months ago that Gavin was still struggling to understand the code, and now he is the chief developer. That's how fluid this community is.

Will Gavin still be the chief developer 2 years from now? Will the official Bitcoin client even be used by anyone but geek users? I doubt it.

The point is there is not one closed group working on Bitcoin, there are several independent groups.

Example: an entrepreneur in Zimbabwe might design a mobile Bitcoin client aimed at Zimbabweans. None of the developers could do anything to prevent this client from joining the Bitcoin network.  

Other example: Someone writes a client designed for storing DNS assignments or other non-monetary transactions in the block chain. Again, nobody could prevent that client from joining the network.

Other example: There might be several competing block chains in fututre, some deflationary and some inflationary, to cater for different ideologies.

We simply do not know Bitcoin will be used 3-5 years from now. If other disruptive technologies are any measure, it's likely to be used by a diverse group of communities, for diverse purposes, some very different from the original intent, some of which we can't even imagine right now.

It's unlikely though that there will still be a "common enterprise".  

Any new technology can be used for both good and bad things.  There is nothing unique to Bitcoin about this.

Inventors and champions of new technology cannot be held personally responsible for what people choose to do with that technology.

If they were, it would be a return to the middle ages where technological development ground to a halt.

Given his expert cryptography and programming knowledge, I find it hard to believe that he has not published a single academic paper, not even a master thesis, not made a single conference presentation, not posted on a single forum (except this one), and not been involved in any other open source coding projects.

Why would he use his real name just with Bitcoin and not other projects?

Perhaps he is a 15-year old self-taught genius, but the more plausible explanation is that he is a professional cryptographer who chose a pseudonym to protect himself against bullying.

Also, why would a 15-year old genius use LaTeX to publish the Bitcoin white paper? LaTeX is a specialised package used almost exclusively in academia.

A Paypal transaction takes 6 months to confirm.

That I call extremely inconvenient.

Saying that "software developers ensure Bitcoin's technical and money-supply properties" is inaccurate.

What ensures Bitcoin's properties is not the software, it's the conventions that the community has agreed upon, the protocol if you like.   

The actual software isn't that critical. Bitcoin does not even need an "official" piece of software. It can happiliy function with several independent clients from different developers as long as those clients adhere to the protocol. 

But even developers have very limited power to change the protocol.

At this early stage the protocol is still undergoing minor modifications but at some point it will be set in stone, and require no further "maintenance".

Even though the bootstrapping of Bitcoin did require a conscious design effort, its long term usage may not.  It is no more a "common enterprise" than the social convention that a piece of rare metal is used as a currency.

usb stick under the mattress.

duh.

Na ja, bin zwar nur ein "Expat" aber trotzdem Wahlschweizer. Zaehtl dass?

Ein zweites Meeting in Zueri ware nett.  Habe das letzte verpasst...

only way to protect yourself from Sauron's tempation is never wear ring, evar.

only way to prevent your bitcoins be stolen is never spend them, evar.

Not much would happen. People would quickly move to a different exchange.  Mtgox and Bitcoin Market were crippled by scammers in Oct 2010 and it didn't threaten the project seriously. This proves that the bitcoin community is pretty resilient and flexible.

This is how i see the future: bitcoin block chain for big transactions. Ripple (or similar) for small transactions denominated in btc. The two technologies complement each other ideally

Bump, because Namecoin has been announced.

My offer still stands.

Will we award this bounty?

If everything costs $0 it doesn't matter if everyone earns $0.

Those people have a good point, they are just a few decades (centuries?) early.

Until the post scarcity economy arrives money will remain a necessary evil.