Thank you all for your thoughtful responses.

@theboos, MacFall: You are all absolutely correct. Knowing that to be the case, I am interested in finding out why many early Btc have never been used. Btc at the start were literally worthless due to the fact that there was no market to trade them in and no one accepting them for services. They only gain value by people using them for goods and services or in trade and assigning a value to them.

@bpd: Understanding the relative risk tolerance between individuals, wouldn't it make sense that some of the first Btc would have been used as the currency has gained value? I just clicked through a fraction of the records (the first 100 then a random sampling) but the ones I saw were all unused at the start of the block chain. Hence my post. I am tempted to write a script to analyze the block chain and see how many Btc are really stashed away out of the first million or so generated. (Anyone have a url of a tool that already does this?)

@iya: To me it would seem natural that the first Btc would have been used to stimulate the nascent Bitcoin trade. I am just curious why it appears many have laid unused.  If one to two thirds of currently existing Btc are in the hands of a few (<10k) individuals who don't actually use bitcoins as a currency then to me Bitcoin is more of a speculative investment vehicle than a currency in the traditional sense. Someone will get left holding the bag. Your comment is illuminating in coming to terms with how many Bitcoins are used in trade and how many are held by the original network participants.

@rezin777: As a newcomer to Bitcoin my original post was meant to help me determine whether or not Bitcoin is legit. As I see it is the custom here, I will match you analogy with an analogy of my own. Imagine two financial scenarios. In the first a bank sources and packages a set of mortgages into a security, selling it to investors based on the quality of the underlying loans. The bank makes a commission and hefty profits whichever way the mortgages end up going. The mortgages tank worse than predicted and the investors lose everything.  No one blames the bank for keeping the money they made. Thats called good business. Now a second scenario, a similar bank owns a massive amount of mortgages and knows they are going bad. They have got to get them off their books ASAP. So they package them into a security, selling it to investors and lying to them by telling them they quality products. They are so sure the mortgages are going to go bad they bet against the security and joke amongst themselves about the people who are buying it, and then make a killing when it tanks. Thats a scheme.

Thanks for all the insight into this. Bitcoin is very cool and seems to be well executed. I am impressed and hope it succeeds for a myriad of reasons.