If he has secured his private keys, then nobody can touch his Bitcoins. Not the NSA, FBI, CIA...

If he has the key in some obvious place, well, he is toast. But if it has been this long, I'd guess he secured is stuff.

Microsoft gave a bit of detail about how this is done:

"We are permitted to publish data on national security orders received (including, if any, FISA Orders and FISA Directives), but only if aggregated with law enforcement requests from all other U.S. local, state and federal law enforcement agencies; only for the six-month period of July 1, 2012 thru December 31, 2012; only if the totals are presented in bands of 1,000; and all Microsoft consumer services had to be reported together."

That way nobody can really tell what these numbers mean...

Inflation is good for bankers and Wall Street, not the common man.

The income gap has been rising consistently, independent of government policy and party since 1971 when the last tenuous tie to gold was cut. That might not be due to monetary policy, but I know of zero economists (not even Krugman) who claims inflation raises the real value of wages and savings.

"So basically you're suggesting a system that hurts the poor and middle class (who have loans), which benefits people with large cash holdings, and which promotes stockpiling money over investment, which hurts everybody. What a load of bullshit. And we haven't had fixed exchange rates between most currencies since the Bretton-Woods system collapsed decades ago."

And do you know why Bretton-Woods collapsed? Could it have been the Federal Reserve printed way more money than they could back by Gold, when that money was supposed to be worth 35 dollars an ounce?

People accuse Bitcoin of being a pyramid scheme, but when the tower of debt collapses (as it did with Bretton-Woods, and it did numerous other times in the past) what then?

Look up the term. "Good Money" generally refers to Gold, money that cannot be printed by the banks/governments. It isn't a term that refers to an emotional judgement about money, i.e. what is "better".

You are arguing about why we have an inflationary currency, and you may be right.

I am pointing out that when a business or a consumer (both sides of a transaction involving money) using a currency that holds its value wins over a currency that loses value over time.

Again, love it or hate it, Thier's Law does apply.

Bitcoin is a deflationary currency. The more people use it (and our economies do grow) the more it is worth. That is how it expands.

That means anyone holding Bitcoin in savings, or in their wages, will share in the "growth" (via growth in value) of the money supply with Bitcoin.

The current system inflates the money supply. And not just to meet new demand, but to insure increasing prices of a set of consumer goods. This is pretty much done by providing money at way below market prices to banks and large corporate entities. Thus the benefits of the growth of the money supply are concentrated with these groups (Bankers and Wall Street).

The consumer is thus faced with a simple choice. How would you like your Wages? In a currency that mostly goes up in value? Or in a currency that certainly (by design and policy) goes down in value?

Thus Thier's Law: When the exchange rate is allowed to float, Good Money drives out Bad Money.

The value of a Bitcoin (unique to anything not patterned after Bitcoin) is the ability to engage in a transaction without the aid of any centralized third parties.

That is an intrinsic property of Bitcoin. And relatively unique to Bitcoin (and other crypto currencies).

You may not value that property, but it does exist, and some people do value it.

If I could demonstrate a Magic Spell to you, would that Spell have worth? What if it could allow you to moving any number (or fraction) of coins from your possession to anyone else in the world without the help of any centralized third party?

Would that have value?

Because that is what Bitcoin is. The ability to engage in transactions without involving any centralized third party. You might not consider that important, but some people do. What is Paypal worth? VISA? MasterCard? American Express? Hint: It isn't zero.

If Miners leave the system, then the computational complexity goes down for verifying blocks. If the price of Bitcoin goes up (which it must with greater usage), then mining becomes more profitable, and will attract more minors.

Really the system works pretty well to balance itself, and likely has nothing to do with a possible crash in price.

If you look over at LiteCoin, a much less popular crypto currency derived from Bitcoin, they just has a large run up, then dropped over half their value. But in the end, they still didn't fall back to their original run up price. They are likely to continue to rise in price as compared to other options.

Really, I think the fears of Bitcoin crashing are overblown. Right now Bitcoin has a capitalization of almost 800 million. Quite a bit, but nothing like the 68 billion capitalization of eBay (PayPal). At LEAST a billion or two of that can be contributed to PayPal. And people think Bitcoin is over valued at a fraction of that? When Bitcoin arguably better addresses the same problems of facilitating transactions, only better, cheaper, more securely?

Especially to the Bankers who are used to a currency expanding by letting them print money.

The horrors that monetary expansion should go to wages and savings!

That was 34 years ago. Some of us are that old.

I would like to do actual development on a smart phone, and why not? It has more hundreds of times the computing power of mainframe I, as a student, shared with the entire university!

I want an app that lets me use any computer and keyboard to connect to my phone, and use it as a gateway to the cloud, to hold my personal work, etc.

Walling yourself up and limiting consumer choices and controlling the platform ...

It works for Apple for the natural 20 percent of the market where people will tolerate limited choices. Apple got ahead of the curve with the IPod, IPhone, and IPad. But they are destine to drop back to their natural 20 percent. The rest of us demand more control, more chaos, and more competition.

Seriously, Germany's copyright views should be canned by anyone willing to take up the fight.