You are right sir. I guess most of the world population could just live in the street... or you know, not eat. That way they would be free of debt. FREEDOM!

Why is the ever increasing value a problem? Multiply the number of BTC that exists (or that will ever exist... about double what we have now), per it's price in USD. Now compare that to the world GDP... it's much, much lower, so no... BTC is not overpriced, in fact, far from it in case it want to become a real currency.

I guess when they discovered gold, there was someone saying exactly the same.

It would be a bit dumb to whoever has 20% of the coin to just dump it. He would loose a huge amount of money that way.

What would happen - assuming that person had an average or above average IQ - is that he will start selling it's bitcoins slowly.

At the moment, if you sell 1000 BTC in MtGox over the course of a day (so, 20 BTC per hour), the impact in the price is minimal, so that person could cash out 1 million dollars per day without affecting the price considerably./b>

So I guess that a group of black people came and enslaved you wouldn't feel it was that much unacceptable, right? I mean, after all it's just a direct result of [arbitrarily long time frame] in which women black people have been treated as either property or second class citizens.

Sure, because the only thing I would like more than, for the US government to have access to all my online life, would be for a US corporation to have access to all my online life.

If you consider that being denied access to certain aspects of the outside world while being held in jail waiting to go to court, is worst than being sodomized and stabbed in some American jail, then yes, USA is certainly better in that regard.

My grandmother stored enough money to buy a car 40 years ago under her mattress and now it's enough to buy an hamburger. I stored enough money to buy an hamburger in my bitcoin wallet 1 year ago, and now is enough to buy a car.

I always pay for my Humble Bundle game deals with bitcoins. OMG, are you telling me Humble Bundle is actually a Pedofile, Terrorist, Marxist organization??? I knew it! I knew it all along!

And Bayer factories produced Zyklon-B... but you don't see people complaining about that when they take an aspirin, do you?

My grocery store doesn't accept electron for payment, and still, I can go to an ATM machine, exchange some electrons to some green paper and pay my groceries. Using Bticoin, I first convert some electrons on bitstamp to other electrons in my bank account, then go to an ATM... well, you get the idea.

Ok, for the sake of convenience I'll pass over the part where you plug in your computer to the electricity, press the power butoon, and open your browser. I must assume that at least you know something.
1 - Write: www.bitstamp.net in your browser address space
2 - Put your user name
3 - Put your password
4 - Press the enter key (it's that big one on the right of your keyboard)
5 - Transfer your bitcoins to the address provided in the bitstamp.net page (sorry mate I can't help you with this one since I don't know what bitcoin wallet you use).
6 - Click: Sell bitcoins
7 - Go to the withdrawals page
8 - Fill in your bank details
9 - Click "withdraw money"

I know, it's quite an obscure and difficult process, but this is a brave new world, and things like clicking in the internet explorer icon and login in onto a website are only easy for those crazy early adopters of technology. Just keep trying there and one day you'll make it like the other genius that accomplished the feat before you.

I do that about, hum, let me see... every day.

So is gold.

1000 BTC is a trivial amount of shares, at much you would loose 5% of their value in dollars if you sold them all in one transaction. MtGox has several transactions like that every day,