The main problem I see with the current economic system is that finance becomes more and more decorrelated from production and consumption of actual goods, be they manufactured products, or services. Well, it shouldn't, otherwise crises happen, and they did happen - two in the 2000's - and they will happen again if nothing is done to fix the mess. (I believe nothing will be done, and we will pay dearly for this.) That Bitcoin thing tries to solve unessential problems, mostly ideological, while making early adopters rich. Should it really gain momentum, however, I see nothing in it that would alleviate the risk of a future financial crisis. On the contrary.

I guess you have to put real money on the table for an auction. Like, $1.

UUCP had a command called cu (call up) which is what you need. From "apt-cache show cu" on Debian/Ubuntu:

The cu command is used to call up another system and act as a dial in terminal. It can also do simple file transfers with no error checking. cu is part of the UUCP source but has been split into its own package because it can be useful even if you do not do uucp.