I know people who lost the wallets with 50+ coins mined to OS reinstallation, because they thinked the Bitcoin is worthless.
I deleted a wallet with 100 coins in 2009 because I realized it was pointless/worthless since the coins couldn't sold even for a penny. At the time this really just seemed like a professor's side project that was going to go nowhere.
I can't imagine how many people probably sold at $.01 because they had ten thousand coins and thought it was hilarious that people would actually pay money for them.
Also, I stand 100% behind what I originally said. It would not take millions of dollars to have generated enough gigahash to have competed in early February. There were only 200-400gh/s in the entire network. A system admin of a 10,000 PC network could have remotely run a miner getting between 5-10mh/s on each CPU, 50-100 gh/s. If he/she was clever enough to have come up with a way of using the video card, there really is no limit to the impact they could have had.
Other guesses, like a botnet herder and etc seem just as valid. I still prefer my guess, though, because I was contemplating the exact same thing at the time. Instead I purchased coins, and I'm more than happy that I did.
