Or trust that they won't have to. This could be due to military power, but probably has more to do with the domestic economy, stability, and general support for the government at home. I suppose those are all intertwined anyway.

Most of that trust is from when we actually had something backing up the money dude.

And I almost added to my post a related quote but I don't want to derail this into politics.

But there is some quote from I believe Paul Krugman which says if aliens could see us dig up this yellow shiny metal from the ground only to re bury it underground, locked up, surround by guards they would laugh that we would call this a pure form of money. According to him this means it has no value because it isn't USED for anything (ignoring jewerly/science uses).

But of course it has value precisely because the market decides it has value. (Because it has the 4 properties a good money should have.) And this is one of many example of Paul Krugman being completely wrong in economics which makes me smile but also cringe at his lack of understanding of money.

This is completely made up though. You are literally making things up.

Tom Collins posted a list of the top holders of btc and how much they hold. Apparently it's public info.

Pretty fascinating to watch. Current price of $118. On pace for $200 next week. Stories on reddit of people's dads wanting to buy $10k. It's going to be fun to watch this one pop.

Link?

It's in this thread, somewhere in the last 2 or 3 pages.

IIRC the biggest holder had ~300k coins, but it wasn't apparent if this was possibly Mt.Gox. It was just a list of the amounts of coins the biggest holders have.

You can't really tell by looking at the wallets as one person can have a million wallets with 1 BTC each. I found this: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmaton...arge-balances/ But it's nearly a year old and a lot of the balances are 0 now, but not all.

This balance has $13 million: http://blockchain.info/address/1933p...vqCn32k2buXY8a

$6 million: http://blockchain.info/address/1BBqj...zCtYzCiQgHqtPN

$9 million: http://blockchain.info/address/1Feex...JrcCrHGW9sb6uF

I thought it was crazy at $70 but this is just insane. I am obviously wishing I had started buying BTC instead of Ag in December.

Here's a link to the richest wallets. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=92423.0;all

Some people may own multiple of those and some may be owned by sites like coinbase.com.

Hopefully this is okay to post:

Will be looking to sell up to 50 bitcoins at MTgox rate once it crosses 125.

Want skrill USD or Euro +vig. (vig negotiable based on amount)

Have unlimited refs who will vouch+many large trades.

1k min

You can't tell if they have multiple wallets, but you can certainly be sure that one person controls one wallet. So that gives you a bare minimum for the concentration of Bitcoins.

Not if it's a coinbase wallet that holds many customer's coins.

It just crossed $125.

I spent some coins this morning at $107.

Even in that case, Coinbase controls the Bitcoins. And you just hope they don't screw you.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but a person can have multiple wallets, so theoretically a individual or a small group of individuals could hold a million bitcoins spread out over multiple wallets and we'd have no way of telling, correct?

Correct.

how did BTC get seeded in the beginning? satoshi & friends publish it and are the only ones mining BTC until random people start joining in? is it reasonable to suspect that "satoshi" is a paper digital hundred-millionaire aorn?

Imo people who hold some btc will likely loose 99% of their investment or be set for life. Imo btc is very undervalued at 130. Disclaimer: I own 2figures of btc and might look to make that 3.

I know I am probably one of the more security paranoid people on here, I've been using TrueCrypt to encrypt important files before any Bitcoin considerations and I keep a fairly tight ship, but man, I do NOT understand why anyone trusts the online wallets. They get hacked or stolen by employees at a CRAZY rate. If anyone is familiar with MPEX, they actually use "The only Bitcoin service that has never been hacked" as their tagline, it's the first thing on their site!

Just in the last day or two, Bitcoin-Central and Instawallet have gone down to security breaches (I believe they're owned by the same people). I haven't looked into it for more than 15 minutes, but from what I gather, the problem with Instawallet was probably one of the more insane things I have ever heard:

Instawallet's authentication setup was such that apparently everyone had a unique URL, and all they had to do to use their account was to go to that URL. No username, no password. This is INSANE, it is completely bananas, it would be chapter 1 in a book called "How not to run a secure web app". It would be chapter 1 in "Examples of things that if you even THINK about doing them in a web app dealing with finance, you are literally mentally ******ed".

I honestly want to write like 4 paragraphs about HOW INSANE this is. I've programmed and deployed web apps for over 10 years and even literally the very first script I wrote, in the dark ages, I knew not to do this.

So what happened was, Google Chrome watches what URLs you enter, and sends them to Google, who indexes them. So a ton of people used Chrome to access their Instawallets, and other people could literally search "site:instawallet.org" on google and it would show a list of links, you would click one and instantly have control of someone's wallet. BANANAS.

Some idiots got mad at Google, which is nuts. Even if Google didn't exist, there are so many other ways that so many people can see what urls are being requested across the web. So crazy.

I actually was very recently considering starting a security auditing business for web apps, I sort of moved away from the idea, but now I think about it, Bitcoin has tons of just insane sites that need help. I don't know whether I should explore that business after all, or maybe just do consulting 1 on 1 for people who want to make sure their Bitcoin setup is secure but also fully backed up. Anyone think there's a market for either of these in the Bitcoin world?

lol you're insane. There's no chance btc goes to nothing.

For sure.

I would think there's a lot of need for that. There's a ton of new startups popping up, and several of them have had to take a step back and regroup because they were in over their head, with security being a key factor.