I guess we need to keep our offline computers enclosed within a copper wire mesh.

Unfortunately just a lower limit on concentration of bitcoins held per individual. I'll bet the concentration is vastly higher than the list would indicate.

Refer to the following link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asset_forfeiture . Sale of forfeited assets is handled by the U.S. Marshals Service: http://www.justice.gov/marshals/assets/assets.html . It takes a while for due process to run its course, and it's too soon for this to happen.

Any sort of business with fiduciary responsibility might do this as cryptocurrency becomes mainstream. A competent individual can take of himself, and usually doesn't need that sort of insurance.

Here's a link: http://www.businessinsider.com/overstock-bitcoin-2014-1 . This is the opinion of Overstock's CEO, nothing more.

The timing of his posts indicate that he's in the Eastern Standard Time zone. Probably eastern U.S. Nick Szabo seems to be the best candidate.

Of course it's not true. The guy was obviously joking. Even if the feds were dumb enough to do this, they couldn't legally, because the legal process hasn't completed.

I don't think that people buying things on overstock rather than holding their coins could explain a temporary price drop because the number of coins spent in one day on overstock (if I recall correctly, about 135,000 USD) is tiny compared to the daily bitcoin trade volume (about 40,000,000 USD). A lot of the bitcoin volume is caused by people just mixing and moving their coins around, but even then, overstock accounts for about 0.33 percent of the total trade volume. I'll agree that even such a small change could have a noticable effect on price, but there exist so many other possible explanations, and no way of knowing for certain the real cause.

It's human nature to over-analyze, and determine a cause for everything, even when It can't be known for certain. If I showed a random signal, people would claim that it follows a deterministic pattern.

Market cap is meaningless because prices are determined on the margin. Say you premine a billion coins, and sell one for a dollar. That doesn't make you an instant billionaire because you can't sell the rest of them for a billion, or even anything close to that. Developers make prices artificially high by making coins artificailly scarce, and selling a few of them to suckers. Their coins look like they are doing well, based upon market cap rankings, but as I said, it's really meaningless. The market is being manipulated through artificial scarcity.

I agree it would probably be litecoin, but disagree on the reason. Market cap is a meaningless concept when applied to cryptocurrencies. It's calculated by multiplying the number of coins in existence by the price per coin at the time of the last sale. A little more meaningul would be trade volume in a fixed time peried, measured in common units, e.g. BTC or USD. However even that isn't very meaningful because some trade volume involves mixing or moving coins already held.

Litecoin seems to me to have the most established market among the altcoins at this time, but its standing might change in the future.

They aren't the same at all.

Suppose all but one person agreed with you, and spent their bitcoins. This would cause the price to skyrocket as merchants adopted it, and the one hold-out would make a killing by hoarding. On the other hand, suppose that 99.99% of bitcoin holders disagreed with you, and hoarded. The other 0.01% spend their bitcoins. This would cause a bubble that would quickly burst, causing the price to plummet. The 0.01% who already spent their coins would make out well, while the other 99.99% would be stuck with coins worth nothing.

Neither scenario is realistic, and reality falls somewhere between two extremes. As long as people expect the price to rise, they will be more likely to hoard. When the price stabilizes, people will spend more. This is inevitable in the early days of cryptocurrency.

In an open market people act in their own self-interest, not in the best interests of the group of competing players.

Look again. I saw bitcoin as a payment option in the checkout cart a couple of hours ago.

Not quite. Individual self-interest conflicts with group self-interest. As long as people expect the price to dramatically increase, they won't spend. Virtually no one will spend coins out of altruism to the group of all bitcoin holders.

I hope you are right. Amazon has more than 50 times as much sales revenue as Overstock. (About 61 billion versus 1.1.billion)

Not misleading at all. Overstock is a U.S. company that operates worldwide. Anyone overseas with a U.S. address, which could be even a maildrop, can buy from them and easily ship overseas. Expats do this all the time. Overstock had sales revenues of 1.1 billion USD in 2012. I'll bet that most of that revenue came from shipments to the U.S., not overseas. So why is that egocentric? This is a U.S. company, after all.

Who knows, or cares, other than the suckers buying it? Last I checked, that coin project uses a company based in Panama to handle the only exchange available. This means that the developer himself ultimately controls the market. For all we know, the exchange numbers could be fictitious.  For more details refer to the following link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There%27s_a_sucker_born_every_minute

What's next? Victimsoffalseaccusationofrapecoin? That would raise awareness, as well. Is this a joke?

Can't give technical mining advice, but why quark? It has a very steep mining curve that has the same effect as premining. I suggest you read the following link before you mine that coin:

http://bitcoinmagazine.com/8972/quarkcoin-noble-intentions-wrong-approach/

There are better quality altcoins to pursue.

A chargeback system doesn't necessarily protect the consumer. Here's a link explaining why porn industry merchants prefer credit cards.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=392310.0;topicseen

The line of reasoning in this subthread makes no sense at all. 1 Bitcoin and 1 Litecoin are arbitrary units. If they is expensive to buy, then you can buy more with them as well. If you think bitcoins are too expensive, then change the settings for your wallet to millibits or microbits. If you are hoarding coins, rather than usng them to buy things, it doesn't necessarily follow that a coin with lower price will increase in value more in the future. The network effect is what makes coins valuable, and it makes no difference what units you use to define them. After all, 1 kilolitecoin is much more expensive than 1 bitcoin.