Creating numbers and telling people they have value is not being a producer of value.

Mining metal and telling people it has value is no different. And in both cases, "telling" people has nothing to do with it. It's an open market with prices set voluntarily by the participants.

Now hold on - they obviously don't have profit as their primary motive. That doesn't mean they are throwing money away. It's an extremely high risk business, but it is still a business and could still return a profit in the very long term.

The article states that senior software engineers price themselves out of the market. This implies that they are turning down high-income development jobs because they can make even more elsewhere - but where? Sales? IT? Freelance consulting? They can't all become managers. Anyone have a good feel on what careers developers tend to age into?

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...