Premine:almost zero. Definitely needs elaborating upon

It already did, and I think we are not far away from 3k$, I think we might test that in q1 of 2014;)

It's pretty easy.

Price is simply supply/demand on the exchange. Remember supply is "people offering to sell" not # of coins generated. So they aren't directly tied together. Difficulty adjusts to keep generation of new coins steady over time. So the supply of total coins out there is steady regardless of price.

I think it happens the other direction. Price goes up, so more people want to mine, and that drives up difficulty. So it isn't rising difficulty pushing the price up, it's rising price pushing up the difficulty.

If price goes down to $10, a lot of people will stop mining (not cost effective vs power bill/etc) and that will bring difficulty down. If price of BTC went to $500, almost everyone farming alt coins would stop and everyone would pile on BTC...

The price is not tied to the diff.,Diff is going up cause bitcoin miners are pointing their gpus to lc and blocks are found more quickly.Thats what drives it.

Hey techmars,

Rewards will be paid as soon as a block is found.  We're having extraordinarily bad luck on this block.

I have upped the block bounty to 10LTC for the next block.  Hopefully it will be found soon.