Got any number to back that up?

It is true. I made a ridiculous looking wikipedia article back in 2006 while making a scavenger hunt for my girlfriend. For more than six years that article has sat there, even though it references fake people, fake companies and fake quotes. It has even been cleaned up a little by others over the years.

The worst it got is a 'this article may contain original research' tag. I'm sure if it had widespread exposure someone would realize it is completely fake. But articles on wikipedia just don't get exposure. They sit there until someone looks them up. And that person is rarely an expert.

Well, many people might be double counted. If you use google at home and at work, you were probably double counted.

Judge: "You are sentenced to 1337 years."

Well, then, bitcoins are backed by the BNP.

You can't mine directly in the client anymore. Check bitcoin.org's mining section. You need specialized software, and because the difficulty is so high nowadays you will have to join an online mining pool which will combine your efforts with other's.

You've got that backward. The exchange rate is 1 bitcoin = $19.51. $500,000 worth of bitcoins is about 20,000 bitcoins.

His name was "allinvain", and the story sound fishy to me, but he was a member of the forum for about a years and had hundreds of posts. I don't think the name was chosen because he was just waiting a whole year before dropping his masterpiece troll.

About $2 million is traded at mt gox every day. And it is always going up. You could get $500,000 in about a week without effecting prices much. No problem.

Confirmation bias. Most people who say "I'm going to get modded into oblivion" do. You just never see them.