The Feds will run out of coins eventually and then they'll have to commandeer some more of them from victimless crimes. But the stashes of them will generally get smaller and smaller as more and more of them get distributed among the people. So they can't count on that strategy for much longer.
Plus, 44,000 Bitcoins even at $1,000 each will still only be $44 Million. There's some whales out there who are watching the Bitcoin market who could probably find that change under the couch
very good point, actually. It seems that this current auction takes place during the on-going sentiment shift, when even a very
BTC-negative news can not do much harm to the price. Last year, on the contrary, we had negative sentiment, when even a very positive events couldn't lift the price much.