How about this for an idea to partially address the issue with dormant bitcoins:

Allow users to voluntarily opt-in to a wallet setting that causes them expire if there is no activity in xyz years.
Create a similar setting that causes the wallet and its balance to gradually expire starting in xyz years.

Force wallets with un-usably low balances that have been dormant for say 40+yrs to expire.
Force wallets that have been dormant past the normal human life expectancy, let's say 100yrs, to gradually expire by say 5% every 10yrs.

I expect the last two suggestions to be rather controversial, but the first two shouldn't be since they would be voluntary measures.

Is there any published information or reports on whether the majority of bitcoins are concentrated in the hands of a small number of accounts?

Also, I don't understand how the miners could potentially be a part of price manipulation other than possibly hoarding the currency, which would seem to make it so that they cannot recover their investments any time soon.

Are you referring to an SSL certificate?  There are reputable companies and non-profits offering them for free.  Take a look at this article for a list of options:

http://voices.yahoo.com/how-free-digital-email-signing-certificate-11406988.html

Note:  Even though the article is focused on email certificates, those can also be used for enable https on a website. 

ag346.  thanks!

Just wondering, would it be appropriate to share links to articles with bad information about bitcoin here for the purpose of having others review and flag as necessary?

I recently came across an article posted on Yahoo voices which spreads false information about bitcoin.  Here is a quote from the article:  " Bitcoins are not being used at all in any actual transactions. One of the few stores about Bitcoin acceptance in transactions is in the realm of illegal drug trades".
http://voices.yahoo.com/bitcoin-uncertainties-speculation-12108778.html?cat=3#new_comment_area

Interesting.  Thanks for the clarification.

I was looking through the alternate cryptocurrency forum and there are several times where someone mentions "merged mined with BTC".

Do you know if it's still possible to do CPU mining for Litecoin?  It seems like there's a lot of talk about GPU mining for LTC, although I thought I remember a mention that LTC was supposed to be less resource intensive than BTC.

Thanks for the feedback.  I guess my concern with such a transaction is that there doesn't seem to be a way to safely make the trade.  Whoever sends their half of the trade could potentially lose their funds, unless of course there was a bitcoin "item" for sale on the amazon.com website.  I would probably only be interested in making a very small purchase, say $5.00 USD in amazon certificates just to get comfortable with the process first. 

Just wondering if there is an exchange out there somewhere that takes gift certificates like amazon and exchanges for bitcoin or other cryptocurrency.  Looks like there are many ways to convert cryptocurrencies to different forms of monetary value. 

Thanks for all the feedback

Can someone share some general information on how much bitcoins miners are earning relative to hardware.

Say for example, if someone has an entry-level mining rig with only one RADEON 7950 GPU and leaves the computer on all day, how much bitcoins are they currently earning?

If there is a chart posted somewhere, please share the link or point me in the right direction.  Thanks.

username ag346

I know that everyone strongly recommends against CPU mining, however, I would like to know if CPU mining is still possible however inefficient it may be?  CGMiner appears to have dropped support for CPU mining even though there is a CPU version that is still included as of 3.3.1:

Q: What happened to CPU mining?
A: Being increasingly irrelevant for most users, and a maintenance issue, it is
no longer under active development and will not be supported. No binary builds
supporting CPU mining will be released. Virtually all remaining users of CPU
mining are as back ends for illegal botnets. The main reason cgminer is being
inappopriately tagged as a virus by antivirus software is due to the trojans
packaging a CPU mining capable version of it. There is no longer ANY CPU mining
code in cgminer. If you are mining bitcoin with CPU today, you are spending
1000x more in electricity costs than you are earning in bitcoin.

Are there any other mining programs that still do CPU mining for either bitcoin or litecoin?

Open a swiss bank account and have the funds transferred there.

I was wondering if there is any information out there on how bitcoin ownership is currently distributed.  Is it similar to traditional currency such as the USD where the top 10% of individuals own 80% of the currency?

On the one hand, I think it's great that the value of bitcoins seems to be doing very well at the moment.  However, it seems that each time the smaller denominations of bitcoin gain noticeable purchasing power, it might encourage those who were able to accumulate large numbers of bitcoins early on to essentially flood the market and destabilize the currency.

One of the posts above was able to provide a link.  However, if it's against the forum rules, then I think just mentioning the name of the website would be enough for someone to do search engine lookup to find the URL.

I'm still new to bitcoins, can you explain how that 1BTC is generating income for you?  Are you using one of the P2P lending sites?