Hey gang- just floating an idea here, because I don't have the technical means to implement it.
Back a couple of decades or so ago, my dad participated in a program where a company would pay you for mailing them your register receipts from the store. I'm not sure what they did with the receipts (marketing research of some sort, I'm assuming), but eventually, they went defunct. I was pretty young back then, but I seem to remember that my dad told me that the government shut them down because they couldn't tax the transactions, or something like that having to do with taxation.
So what's my point, you ask? Has anyone considered that the one weak point in this system is the Internet itself? With the way things are going now, I would not put it past the US government to shut down the Internet (Past talk of an Internet kill switch ring a bell with anyone?) or somehow illegitimize/illegalize the process if btc REALLY took off.
To protect against this, has anyone considered taking the btc idea onto a handheld platform? I'm not saying that we need to go to this extreme ->
http://www.behance.net/gallery/Digital-wallet/541305 (although that might be really cool, too!) but it might be useful to have some sort of hardware/software implementation where 2 people could link their BlackBerrys, IPhones, IPads......whatever....to each other and exchange btc in person?
Reminds me of the old sci-fi series TekWar where they had a digital wallet of sorts that did much the same thing, but hey.....it wouldn't be the first time that art imitated life.
Just a thought.