Time will tell. I am not jumping on this bandwagon yet, but I welcome this as a potentially useful idea.
Weekend reader: Quantitative Analysis of the Full Bitcoin Transaction Graph http://eprint.iacr.org/2012/584.pdf Summary: This analysis was done using Bitcoin usage up to 2112 May. There were 9 million BTCs created up to that point, and about 3/4th of them were never been used In plain English, only 2 million BTCs were responsible for the price movements of the last 3 years, since creation. So saving/hording is/can be a serious problem. Here is what I don't get. Once BTC's value reached higher values (let's say above a dollar), and people saw that this can be used for longer term gains, that explains hording. But why would the early adopters hord and save instead of trying to circulate the coins like any good currency should do? So was their goal enriching themselves or were they trying to create a popular and widely used new currency? To me hording shows the "let's get rich by making this a Ponzi" idea. If I create a new system altruisticly (or as an experience) and want to get people to adopt it, I would throw the coins all around. Give 500 to this, 2000 to that. After all if I am (and/or a few friends of mine) the only owner, the coins are worthless. You have to hype them and introduce them to others and make them except it to gain value. Now there could be another explanation, that a huge amount of coinage were lost, due to forgetfullness and uninterest. Somebody gave me 10K coins but I never thought of it anything and I forgot where they are or the password. That is a possibility too. But I tend to question the motivations of any very early adopter who is sitting on 50K+ coins never used. Did you create a useful new currency for everyone, or did you just enrich yourself?
In the early days bitcoins were worthless as you can assume, so there was not much interest about them as an store of value. For instance there is the now infamous 10000 BTC pizza: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=137.0 Also, in the early days, it was very simple to "mine" the bitcoins. You could get several thousand per week with the right equipment. The abundance made it look like a nice crypto toy so I guess many early adopters didn't take it seriously and most of those coins are lost in one way or another. Although I would agree that whoever Satoshi Nakamoto is (a single person, or a group) must be sitting in a nice pile of BTC probably numbered in the millions.
For Atticus or any serious trader with the dough, here is a Romanian company where you can trade stocks, futures and options in BTC: http://mpex.co/ The set up fee is steep (30 BTC and non-changing), but the owner says it keeps out the hobbyists and the company is doing fine right now. January report: http://polimedia.us/trilema/2013/mpoe-january-2013-statement/ Discussion of the whole company: http://www.loper-os.org/ The owner's response to it: http://polimedia.us/trilema/2013/in-which-we-discuss-datskovskiys-discussion-of-mpex/
I've mentioned MPEx in the past. I don't know anything about the co but am interested in trading vola in BTC. I didn't know about the "loper-os" link.
Thought about it this morning.... Could the US Gov mandate all commercial transactions be settled *only* in USD? Thereby outlawing any alternatives? That's an elegant solution, for the evil-doers.