Sorry, I was thinking about bytecoin (which is a direct clone of bitcoin), you can use GUIMiner for bytecoin.

You grab a piece of mining software (e.g. GUIMiner), sign up at a mining pool and start to mine.

I've followed Jeff for years. He'll make this happen if anyone can...

The real problem for this gaining world-wide acceptance however is that the places that need it most (i.e. Cyprus, Japan, Argentina, and the PIGS) are the exact places that have government who would be the first to ban bitcoins.

It seems that every franchise owner for these things would be risking the local government swooping in and stealing their whole business.

For now I'd be comfy seeing these things in the USA though; New Hampshire and Texas at least would use them like crazy.

Yeah, they may be rich, but they can't buy a supersized Coke where they live, so the jokes on them. 

The road to $50 saw gains of dollars per day.  After $100 we are seeing jumps of $10+ per day.  At $500 we will see jumps of $50+ per day.  $1000 we will see gains in the hundreds.   

Yes.

Simple version: no.

For there to be any disruption adoption would have to be on a massive scale (i.e. millions of new users every week).  Bitcoin would implode under such adoption.  The infrastructure (imagine MtGox getting hit with 200x as much volume .... next month), the codebase (not exactly Grandma friendly yet), and the protocol (unresolved issues like tx fee marketplace, 1MB limit, etc).

Now nothing of these are impossible obstacles but they will take time.  Bitcoin in 2013 looks a lot different then Bitcoin in 2009 and likewise Bitcoin in 2019 is going to look even better.   If millions upon millions of people poured into Bitcoin today it likely would freeze up.  Bitcoin would survive but it wouldn't be optimal.  Some nice 100% to 300% annual organic growth is much better.  It gives the "system" (the ecosystem of developers, clients, service providers, merchants, etc) to build up to that scale.

Note I am not saying I or anyone else should decide how much growth is too much.  It will happen automatically but as growth exceeds the capability of the "system" friction will be introduced which slows growth.

With the assumption that the difficulty ("hardness") to move from one dollar to the next remains constant, which is not true. 

I don't think it's so difficult to check out the chart yourself, but anyway FYI here is the hourly chart of the whole crash in June 2011, http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#igHourlyzczsg2011-06-06zeg2011-06-12ztgSza1gSMAzm1g200zm2g21zv
there are a number of traits for you to see:

1.The price moved up very fast before the top, can be 100% per day.
2. The price then made a rapid downmove, which in itself is not enough for you to distinguish a crash from a normal correction.
3. The price then slowly recovered but never reached the previous top.
4. The price then started to decline slowly but surely, for a few days, at this stage it becomes more and more clean that the selling pressure is outweighing the buying pressure and the current price range could not last for long.
5. Eventually the price made a final decisive move below the brown hourly SMA 200 line, accompanied by large volume, which marked the beginning of the bear market.

But it's just the past, which very well may not tell anything about the future.

I'm not sure we are the early adopters. I would say the early adopters are the ones who have thousands of BTC. The same with the other coins, if you don't own at least 10,000 can you say you're early? or late? What we need to figure out is how late is too late?

Just 271585% per year if constant compounded daily.  I don't hear any alarm bells.   

2% daily growth would bring us to ~$200k this time next year.  

And how would a bitcoin confiscation be performed?

buy on news sell on hype.