They could be either people willing to bring USD to the site to buy coins, or they could be all the people holding the 10 million of passive coins wanting to sell them. The second seems more likely to me.
Are you serious? That's not even a debatable scenario, that's categorically untrue. Do you think the massive amount of largely stagnant coins (mostly held by early adopters and big investors like our friend the Reptilian Overlord
) is held by THAT many people? Enough people to fuel a 20,000 account PER DAY sign-up rate? Not to mention that the queue for $1000+ deposits is well over 16,000... There weren't even 20,000 people TOTAL involved in the early days of bitcoin. Even if you consider that a portion of the passive 10 mil is recent small holders, there STILL aren't anywhere near enough to fuel the recent boom in accounts and deposits. You, my friend, are not paying attention
1) There are not anywhere near enough early adopters/big holders/small holders to fuel a 20,000 account-per-day sign-up rate that's been going on for quite some time (you are wrong by many, many orders of magnitude)
2) Queue indicates that people are verifying for large deposits at record rates.
QED: The second option (people holding passive coins logging on to sell and causing the ridiculous number of signups) is not in any way, shape, or form "more likely."
Would like to see some one take another look at those locations/addresses where satoshi is alleged to have stashed all his coins, to see if there are still there or have been moved to gox. IMO someone caused this crash by selling a huge amount of coins all the way down (maybe a million or so). Gox will know, but we should be able to work it out from the BC