Yes. We can start some traditions meant to bring Satoshi back, and create prophecies regarding his reappearance.

Some ideas for traditions...

Burning fiat currency
Sending encrypted messages

In the realm of details, however, that is not true.  The trip will be about $500 when all is said and done.  Gavin's typical salary as a programmer in the last few years, which is a matter of public record because he was working for the state of Massachusetts, was in the range of $30,000 - $40,000.

I have no sense of entitlement at all; I'm not asking for the money myself, obviously.

I think it's manifestly wrong to suggest he's being paid as a random person knowledgeable about Bitcoin, rather than as the lead developer.  I would be very surprised if his speaking ability, whatever it might be, entered even slightly into the decision to invite him.  Someone almost surely made a list of interesting new technologies and then contacted the corporate or community leaders they identified.

But it leads to potentially unfortunate project-management dynamics if, when the one chosen as "development lead" is asked to speak somewhere, he pockets the fee as if he has earned it personally rather than as a result of the efforts of the community of developers.  I don't need to be a committed developer (yet?) on this project to say that; my point is that it decreases my willingness, and perhaps that of others, to volunteer time and effort to contribute. 

There is a more ethical and mature ethos at organizations like the Apache Software Foundation than I see in evidence in this thread.  I recognize the countercultural spirit of this group (though I find the anarchic extremeness of many of its members bizarre, difficult to read, and distortive of the discussion -- for example, Bitcoin almost certainly does not represent any sort of threat to the White House, the Internal Revenue Service, or other countries' analogues of those organization, and grandiose claims of that nature are at best distracting), but that doesn't mean that the development group doesn't have lessons to learn from other open-source communities of developers.

It's becoming difficult to read all of the posts. Several threads I just skim nowadays.

Did you guys already forget about BitcoinUSA? That should tell you how much bitcoiners care about trading in a non anonymous way.

link?

The "slave" talk is rubbish.  I'm calling on him to say what he'll do with the money; he can choose or choose not to do so ("voluntarily," as libertarians like to say).  Which he chooses will inform the community about features of its organization and of Gavin.

Too many in this forum respond with blind negativity to anything that sounds like cooperation, which is particularly ironic in an open-source community.  The most ridiculous along those lines that I've seen was, in an early discussion of pooled mining, the response:  "But isn't pooling communism?"  For people professedly so concerned with political theory, it might help actually to read some political theory.  (Also, it might help to examine the world a bit more empirically; for example, do you think neoclassical economics and the incentive structure it proposes easily explains the motivations behind the developers of Linux?)

That has basically already happened:  see the first "news" link on bitcoinwatch.com

whether Gavin pockets the $3000 for personal use rather than accepting it on behalf of the community he represents is a bigger issue because of what it represents about the organization of this community.