LOL no one is stating end of the world... in fact the majority of my concern is localized.... but here's some examples, some far more recent than the Carrington Event that burned unplugged telegraphs to the ground.
On March 13, 1989 a severe geomagnetic storm caused the collapse of the Hydro-Québec power grid in a matter of seconds as equipment protection relays tripped in a cascading sequence of events.[2][11] Six million people were left without power for nine hours, with significant economic loss. The storm even caused aurorae as far south as Texas.[3] The geomagnetic storm causing this event was itself the result of a coronal mass ejection, ejected from the Sun on March 9, 1989.[12] The minimum of Dst was -589 nT.
In 2003 The Wide Area Augmentation System (WAAS) operated by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) was offline for approximately 30 hours due to the storm.[17] The Japanese ADEOS-2 satellite was severely damaged and the operation of many other satellites were interrupted due to the storm.[18]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geomagnetic_stormI am by no means saying a power grid shutdown in Canada cutting power to six million people is the end of the world, but it IS a problem... I just believe that our systems should be more shielded, in focus there should be some protection of bitcoins because the VAST majority of them are digital and digital only (though I do like some of the stuff that casascius is building, it still represents only a tiny fraction of the ~ 8 million bitcoins in existence).
if a solar storm did wipe some machines and backups at Mt. Gox for example , it could potentially cause a loss of a large number of bitcoins and affect day to day growth of bitcoins in general.
Is it the end of the world, not even close... most likely it would be a growth opportunity as those affected areas would need to purchase new machines, hardware, etc... but in the short and mid range it would be problematic.
