Alright, so I'm excited at the possibilities Bitcoin offers (and I'll be holding on to my meager 4.5 bitcoins) but I've noticed something that few people seem to talk about.  Isn't the IRC channel used for bootstrapping a single point of failure?  Wouldn't the loss of this channel result in an inability for new clients to connect?  I can see the advantages of having a distributed, peer to peer system, but from what I can tell... Bitcoin isn't entirely distributed.

Especially... what happens if the IRC channel gets hijacked?  If the hijacker can control which clients can connect and which can't... well, they don't necessarily need to have more power than the entire network if they control which machines make up the network, right?

I don't know much about how the software works, but these are just a few concerns I have about the system.

EDIT: Question #1 (loss of connectivity) has been addressed.  I'm still curious about question #2 (malicious IRC channel).