Perhaps you can explain how you fit the gold into your intertubes when trying to send it to someone online...

Will slashdot ever stop upmoding this copy/paste spam? It was kinda funny the first time it was posted. By now, most of slashdot has seen the joke multiple times already.

People, if you're into cryptography, infosec, parallel programming, economics, or finance, you will probably find bitcoin interesting. If you don't find it interesting, however, then don't click on bitcoin stories. And for the love of Bob don't paste tired old joke spam into such stories.

I go for functional fictional space names. My flagship desktop system is named "enterprise," my netbook is named "hovercraft," and my HTPC is named "holodeck."

(the iPad is "Wesley")

claiming that this volatile currency would not be traded long

Bitcoins are being traded. A single, independent exchange is down. But if you knew how bitcoins worked, you would realize that you don't even need an exchange to trade them.

So in conclusion: can bitcoins currently be traded? Yes. But can they be bought/sold for US dollars? Also yes. Are your predictions proving correct? Not at all.

Now that some big player(s) have cashed out

Did you make that part up? Which big player are you referring to? According to the MTGOX exchange, they were hacked and the hacker sold stolen bitcoins. This cannot be honestly described as "a big player cashing out."

Write-only in a security context means it can't be read back digitally (by a hacker). Someone onsite needs to do something physical make it readable.

You seem to be confusing bitcoin with egold. Bitcoin is an open source project, not a corporation.

For all we know, he's been selling his bitcoins as fast as the market will bear without crumbling...

The US will get rid of its nuclear reactors only after nuclear weapons become obsolete. Remember, it's not about cost or the environment; it's about plutonium production.

We are going to be running on coal/nuclear/nat.gas until 'clean' energy is cheaper than both.

Wrong. The secret value in SecurID tokens is not some private key in a PKI. It's just a random number. There is no reason RSA couldn't just write these random numbers to write-only media and delete all other copies after sending them to the customer. There is no reason to keep them accessible on the network--let the support people sneaker-net the numbers if the customer loses theirs! That's the appropriate level of security for something as sensitive as this.

Of course, I'm sure they know this. The real reason RSA kept their customers' seed records vulnerable on the wire was so that they could outsource their support to third world crop-pickers at $1/hour. I've spoken with RSA support flunkies--they've never even seen the product they support, in many cases. RSA is walmart-quality security.

You shouldn't compare rainbow tables to brute-force crackers. Password crackers like this can work against a salted password. Rainbow tables are worthless for salted passwords.