yes, I especially like your competition in everything quote ... and that's what I despise about fiat currency the most also ... the forced monopoly.

There will be many crypto-currencies 5 years from now and certainly the ones that work best will have the widest adoption.  A currency which maintains some stability day to day will win over one that fluctuates so wildly.  Even in my own personal experience selling bitcoin to an individual who was trying to actually use them (he wouldn't say what for) ... but his request to me was to offer the coins to him at a fixed rate.  The daily fluctuations in price messed up his business model when prices would change before he could complete the whole cycle of a deal.

Managed stability is a good idea ... only problem with the FED system is that it's managed robbery ... lol, as we mentioned before.  So, I would love to work with some folks to design a more useable type of crypto-currency.  We could just start with a wish list.  Some items on my wish list are:

-clients that don't need to download the whole freaking block chain ;-)

-price stability (so I can put an item for sale on a web page and not have to adjust the price every other day).

-built in reputation features ... it could still be anonymous, but it would be nice to see that an address has done some deals and has some positive feedback

-built in escrow features

-backed by something else of value -- Bitcoin blazed the trail and it's not back by anything other than good marketing and perception.  Bitcoin does have value now, and so it could be used to back a new virtual currency.

What about you guys?  Surely Bitcoin has some features you would like to tweak, no?