Bookmarked! Will take a look when I get back to my machine later! IIRC dlopen isn't really necessary most of the time right? The OS will map the dynamic library to the function stubs (in .plt) at load time? 

>it would be risky to use it for production-level distributed software, but i imagine one could use it trivially on bitcoind to make a fully self-contained binary
Agreed. Not sure the usefulness though, other than it being a somewhat portable binary if you build it right lol. I tend to enjoy the idea of stable ABIs and dynamic libraries.