There is one missing reason why gold has value. An irrational belief in gold's value. Gold does have a few special properties, but it's value is just an illusion that we have come to accept. Of course if everyone buys into this illusion it creates real, tangible value.

When you say "invest", what do you mean? If you are thinking about buying and holding until the price goes up, you have a better than 50/50 chance of making some money over the long haul. But it is by no means certain. You should never invest more than you could afford to loose. If you are thinking about buying BTC so you can spend them for products and services, that is a better bet. There are some great deals at bidding websites and others right now.

Trading in currencies is a brutal game, especially in an unregulated/uninsured market. One can make money at it, but then again it's true that one could make money buying lotto tickets.  BTC is a excellent money for buying stuff on the Internet. As an investment it should be considered risky.

Related? I got an email from someone at flattr saying they were interested in bitcoin, and were considering adding along with some other currencies.

This could help. See if anyone near you will sell in person. Safe and fast.
http://btcnearme.com/

Well I was kidding about being "comforted" about a secret controlling group. But i don't believe such a group exists. I DO think history is easy to find. If you go to a university and study the secret societies you will find that, while they had some power, they could not control the world. Not even close. Most of them died out.
It would be magnitudes more difficult to control the world today.

As far as I'm concerned the problems at Mt.Gox have nothing to do with bitcoin. I still believe it is a viable monetary system with a big future. Of course I'm going to continue using it.

The fact that professional thieves are targeting BTC shows they believe in it's value also. And this is just the beginning. Right now the risk/reward ratio for stealing bitcoins is very favorable if you are a criminal. They are easy to steal, it is easy to get away with stealing, and it is doubtful that the police will come after you.
These problems are being addressed and BTC will become much more secure in the future. When it does the price will likely go way up again.
I'm planning on buying as soon as trading begins again. I hope to find some deals while everyone is unsure and offering low prices.

Remember it is not just length and complexity. If you use real words that is not strong enough. There are about 80k English words in common usage. It would take only seconds for a dictionary attack to check if your PW is one of those words.
I hate long, hard to remember passwords also, but the days of anything less are gone. In the past year or two simple PWs became obsolete. You may have not noticed because no one really wants to break into your facebook account. Now that BTC users have accounts with money in them, the serious criminals are here to show you just how open you are.

Below is an example of a hard to brute force pw. Not very user friendly is it?

Kt#*8t487C9cV;F7C*^8c(*vexlk7dsYry%$C6E5

At this point it would almost be comforting to think that there are secret groups so competent that they could control the world. The fact is no such entity exists. The biggest decision a group of free masons are likely to make is what day to hold the annual BBQ on.
Ya know, history is all written down. It may not be as interesting as the nonsense dreamed up by our sophomoric pop culture, but the truth is easy to find.

Just a reminder that it is likely that only the "low hanging fruit" will be picked. If you have a strong password ( this is what that looks like =" Upo38&64#%uVyt@114(9y6rew5 " ), then you are not an easy target. You should also keep very little at your exchange site.  The bulk of your bitwealth should not be online. Not in your program appdata file, not on your desktop, not at a cloud server. The safest is on several USB/CD's, encrypted and hidden.

So far it is accounts with weak passwords that are being hit hard. A strong password buys you time to change it before cracked.

And when L/S says it's been tested and all threats have been addressed... Your going to put your money in? After they have had a chance to check it all out?  No thanks.

I vote for mixing it up. Keep your motherload on a USB stick in a vault or whatever. Then keep a few in an online wallet for access from anywhere.

Yes, I just treat it like normal money. Thinking about buying some shoes with BTC tonight.

Yes, it may have already happened durrig the big drop. LulzSec sent a tweet at the bottom of the market with instructions to buy BTC while the "morons" were in a panic. That was the same weekend when a flood of new accounts showed up saying the sky was falling.

Not this bull shit again.      Time to get out the ban stick on these forums.

riush, that looks awesome! last night I used my Blu-Ray player to test! Thanks for distributing this as an open source project. It just expanded the world of bitcoin transactions to many new platforms.

allinvain, I'm truly sorry to hear about this. What a crappy thing to do to you.  
I hope something can be done to get at whoever did this. It sure does look like a targeted attack by someone who knew what you had. It may be of little consolation but as mentioned before, crooks tend to wind up living miserable lives. You should not keep beating yourself up over this, you were taking basic precautions. This could have happened to any of us (except Vladimir).

I'm happy to see this being discussed. The 3rd. world poor who comprise most of the worlds population could stand to gain from BTC. As mentioned, a key is the smartphone.
A couple years ago I was treking through Panama's Darien Gap. One of the most remote places on the Earth.  I was shocked when I found one of the villages had put up a cell tower! They only had like 5 phones that they used to coordinate themselves while hunting monkeys. But, they could do data and kinda had the internet.

I bought some baskets and crafts they were making for a few bucks. The Embara/Wounan tribes make crafts that are sought after by museums and collectors everywhere. If they had BTC they could sell online and ship by canoe to a road, then mail service abroad. This would be huge for them. A nice basket costs about $30USD in the village. In a gallery it is more like $500USD.

What? PLATO you did'nt die??? Great, I guess I lost 2BTC on that bet.

j/k Nice job man.

My guess is a needed correction. However...
I'm not one for wild conspiracies, and this weekend could just be what an unregulated market looks like, but some part of me wonders if this was an operation. First trolls show up and claim the sky is falling at about the same time a few sells at weirdly low prices happen. The bottom falls out and we are in the $10 range. Then a tweet from LulzSec says buy now from the panicked "morons" and some step in and buy up coins at bargain prices. The trolls disappear and the price shoots back up.

Tinfoil hat or plausible?

Nice work brother!