Somewhat unrelated---I didn't know that the original Bitcoins were not spent! That's really strange to hear; I can hardly imagine a person resisting the urge to cash them in at some point (whatever the reason of resistance). Crazy stuff.
Also when Satoshi left the development team in 2010 he could've been mining normally like everyone else, and he could have easily amassed 10,000+ Bitcoin in that time without it ever being linked to his early 1,000,000 coins.
I think it's likely Satoshi has cashed out millions of dollars worth of Bitcoin, just not from the pile of coins everyone is watching.
The "What is money" section seems to agree (when leaving out the word "only"):
"The real difference between Bitcoin and a national currency is that national currencies are backed by governments, whereas Bitcoins aren’t really backed by anyone other than the miners."
So, the thing that is backed by governments is money, the other thing is not.
Plot MSFT US Equity over the past 10 years and tell me how a logarithmic scale on the y axis would improve over a regular y axis?
Most stocks don't grow logarithmically, especially over shorter periods of time.
Not to go all appeal to authority, but Bloomberg and Reuters, the two top names in financial information show their charts using a regular, non logarithmic scale. If you think logarithmic is always better you should take it up with them:)
EDIT, the link below actually illustrates my point as it says that logarithmic is good for large jumps, which as I mentioned, don't usually happen over the time periods that people view returns.
So you say a jump from $30 to $31 is equal to a jump from $3 to $4. I thing that is misleading.
When price jumps are small the error also gets small, but it is still there.
>On the negative side, there is no one to step in and help stabilise it should things start to go wrong (for example, the various governments that printed more money to help ease the cash flow crisis in the ‘Credit Crunch’).
There are other mechanisms that don't involve the printing of money in order to stabilize the economy. However, it is true that increasing or decresing the amount of money in circulation is a very simple way to do it. For example, bitcoin could live along with government backed money, like the greenbacks were in use at the same time as gold-backed money.
>In practical terms, the biggest difference between Bitcoin and most other currencies at the moment is the wildly fluctuating exchange rate.
This is true right now due to the fact that the whole bitcoin economy is worth only a few billion dollars, but if bitcoin succeeds in becoming the world's currency it will most likely fluctuate less than any other currency.
> It’s also possible to get wallets that are hosted online, for example, at blockchain.info
Strictly speaking their claim is that they're only hosting the encrypted version. Whether that's the case and the client doesn't phone home is difficult to tell.
