the jump in interest generally comes when you explain that there will only ever be 21 million. this seems to completely change the character of the conversation.
Only 21 million bitcoins, but there is nothing preventing other "issuers" from copying the design of Bitcoin and creating "Cryptotokens", and "Liberty Hashes," "Stealth Gold," "African Bitcoins," etc.
That's not a bad thing. Bitcoin is going to have to be majorly upgraded with a new blockchain when SHA-256 is broken, and money is not the only scarce things to be decentralizedly allocated - I previously commented on Namecoin.
We've started a habit of creating periodic Bitcoin threads to confine discussion thereof to those threads and prevent excessive proliferation of Bitcoin topics in the discussion section. Here is a link to the last one, which links the other discussions. Lot's to talk about, and another bounce in Bitcoin's value (up to 33 then down to 24), so share your links and thoughts!