Casascius, you probably account for most of the reason why BTC has rebounded so sharply. First you bought a lot of BTC, then you started mining professionally so that the other single GPU miners and CPU miners couldn't make as much as they used to. This was like a double-whammy to the BTC flow which is why people are willing to pay $8 per coin today.
You make me out to be a far bigger fish in the sea than I am.
When I bought that equipment, I probably constituted about 2-3% of the entire Bitcoin network. Remember, there are only 144 blocks awarded per day, and if I'm scoring three or four of them a day, well, what percentage is that? You do the math. Today, there are still 144 blocks a day, but if I score one every other day, I must be about 0.3% of the network now.
Amazing isn't it? BTC value is up by a factor of 10, and mining output is down by a factor of 10... meaning mining is just as profitable to start today as it was when I started in February. I am convinced that this ratio will stay in equilibrium due to the "should I buy or should I mine" thought process.
Certainly, my wind of three or four percent is not responsible for the 1000% growth of Bitcoin over the past three months.
I'm concerned whether or not you're going to be kicking yourself for not selling BTC sooner if MtGox goes down and the price of BTC crashes.
Who says I'm not selling? I have been selling little bits this whole time. Look at the OTC board. Want to buy some? I am down to about 18,000 BTC.
I can tell you guys this, when the price flows like it has been, there's FAR too much wealth concentrated in one location. If MtGox is physically shut down and raided anyone who has even a penny in there is going to lose it forever.
MtGox is operated from Japan. What you say could be true about dollars (one could in theory shut down MtGox's bank account and make him dollar insolvent) but not true about Bitcoins (which are stored in the block chain, not in any physical location, and as long as he keeps his wallet file backed up, no "raid" can take it). If that bothers you, don't keep dollars in MtGox.
We should watch legislation like hawks for any new bills being signed that might make a raid on the exchange legal, because once it's confiscated, ain't no one going to get it back and the lamentations we hear because of it will ensure NO ONE buys BTC for a very very long time.
Look at what happened to Wikileaks. They tried to shut down wikileaks.org, and 1400 new mirrors popped up overnight. MtGox doesn't have a monopoly on the Bitcoin trading market, someone could start a viable competitor tomorrow and be in business easily.
