bitcoinex - I'm not as pissed at you as most people in this thread are. There was a $4.15 trade on 'gox this morning, personally that seems pretty inflated to me.Exchanges are the obvious weak points in the bitcoin economy, a motivated entity could take down all the exchanges if they devoted enough effort.

Instead of squabbling let's integrate some of the cool stuff that the Cypherpunkd podcast talks about, and create a much less centralized exchange network.

Is there open source exchange software, for users who want to create their own exchanges? (edit: yes, unmaintained code here) Does it work well? Is there a way to sync it with the web of trust, so users can have some measure of confidence in new exchanges?

Users should have good ways to contribute to local exchange and trade if they're unwilling to meet face to face - e.g. they can mail or receive cashiers' checks or money orders.  (edit - see Ubitex)

We can extend the OTC web of trust (or rather, import it) into the physical realm for such transactions. The 'Black and Yellow pages' mentioned in one of those podcasts seemed to embody this idea (note that it's not fully implemented yet)

There was something else called Open Transactions that seemed to be a standard for online transactions, including but not limited to Bitcoins - I haven't looked into that yet.

I don't know if bitcoinex is being a dick or if he is trying to help Bitcoin or both, but this at least should drive some great discussion!