I own 10 shares of BTCINVEST and I second that. Thank you Ukyo.

Instead of coming up with an out-of-the-box idea, I'd like to point your attention to one that already exists, regarding toll roads.

Recently, a new "toll lane" was constructed alongside one of Israel's busiest highways. It is privately built and maintained, and physically separated from the 3-4 public lanes of the road.
When the public road is congested (which it usually is), you can choose to bypass the traffic jam by entering the toll lane.

The really neat part is the pricing of the toll. There's a camera above the entrance to the lane, and a computer counts the number of cars entering. An algorithm automatically adjusts the price according to the number of cars already inside the lane. The more cars enter the lane, the more demand there is for using it, and the higher the price will get. A digital sign just before the entrance to the lane presents the current price, and is updated minute-by-minute. This way, drivers can decide whether to use the toll lane or the public lanes, based on how bad the traffic is on the public lanes and how expensive the toll lane currently is.

The live price adjustment can assure that there is NEVER a traffic jam on the toll lane, no matter how congested the public lanes are, by balancing demand and supply. Drivers can be certain that entering the lane will allow them to quickly bypass the traffic jam - the only question is, how much are they willing to pay for that. In fact, the company that runs the lane will not charge you if you spend more than X minutes on the lane due to congestion. This is all monitored automatically by cameras along the road.

By the way, there is no need for complicated RFID-based solutions for toll collection - the cameras do that too. They just snap a picture of your license plate and the bill comes in the mail a few days later.

Well if you're treating bitcoin only as a speculative commodity and not as a currency, then yes, you are absolutely right.
I certainly hope most people in the bitcoin ecosystem disagree with you.

You realize the 1000 shoppers will first have to buy the 250BTC in order to spend them...
It's a closed loop. Say I buy a bitcoin, immediately spend it on Overstock, and then Overstock immediately sells it for fiat. The market price will not change at all - only the exchange volume will go up. This will decrease volatility, as well as convince more people that bitcoin is a real transactional currency.

This can only be a good thing for the ecosystem. Of course, I agree it would be even better if they kept the bitcoins and used them to pay salaries and suppliers, but that will take a while.

That's not entirely precise. The spikes you outlined on the chart actually take place a little bit after the price starts crashing, not before.
For each spike, I noted when it occurred relative to the crash, and how the price changed after the spike:

Date             BDD              Price change

14/06/2011    53,532,635    4 days after crash began. Price continued to decline slowly for months.
16/11/2011    52,127,501    2 days after crash began. Price rose over the following weeks.
10/04/2013    52,694,509    The day of the crash. Price continued to decline.

There was another big spike (above 50,000,000 days destroyed) which you didn't outline:

25/10/2013    57,050,042    1 day after small crash began. Followed by weeks of exponential increase.


So there's no clear correlation, except that transaction volume and bitcoin days destroyed spike after a crash begins, as people rush to move coins from their wallets to exchanges for liquidation. The price behaviour after a spike in bitcoin days destroyed is not at all consistent.

I will also note, as I've said before, that yesterday was significantly different from previous spikes in that output volume was low. What happened yesterday cannot be compared to the previous spikes.

A bigshot miner from 2010 leaves 120k coins unencrypted for almost 3 years?
I guess anything's possible...
Anyway, it's pretty clear they weren't moved to an exchange. Either they weren't sold, or they were sold off the market.
Either way, I don't expect this to affect market prices.

Probably. In fact, whenever the transaction volume goes up, bitcoin days destroyed is bound to go up too...
So the OP chart isn't much use on its own. The interesting metric is the ratio of bitcoin days destroyed / total output volume. That actually makes yesterday much more interesting: all the previous spikes in days destroyed were correlated to high output volume. Yesterday wasn't just the highest spike in days destroyed ever, it also happened on a day with below-average output volume.

Possible, but not likely. There were 120k coins in 28 addresses. Each was moved to a new address. So now there are still 120k coins in 28 addresses, just different addresses. No reorganisation, just a transfer.

Plus, if you thought your coins were safe where they sat since March 2nd, 2011, why change your mind now?

Wow... You're right, I missed that. ~120k coins, a bit over 1000 days old. And it's pretty clear they were sold, because all the outputs just moved 'as is' to new addresses. No splitting, merging, mixing, or otherwise rearranging. Why would someone do that if not to simply transfer the funds to someone else?

Note that the transactions on Nov. 26 were of negligible quantity; however, if you follow some of the money around, it kinda looks like some of it was sold during 2012.

How do you figure that? I guessed it would be a smaller amount of older coins, seeing how there were no huge transactions yesterday (involving old coins) and no spike in total output volume.

Can you tweak the Keurig so it pulls in some hashes when it's not making coffee? Maybe we'll call it a Keu-mini-rig 

I believe they seized almost 30k of customer's funds:

https://blockchain.info/address/1F1tAaz5x1HUXrCNLbtMDqcw6o5GNn4xqX

Plus 144k of DPR's money:

https://blockchain.info/address/1FfmbHfnpaZjKFvyi1okTjJJusN455paPH

The 600k figure was an estimate of the total revenue Silk Road had ever made. It doesn't account for tens of thousands of Bitcoins that he had spent over the years (on things like server expenses, paid employees, fake hitmen etc...).

Possible, but that would probably spike the total transaction volume quite a bit. Seems to make more sense that it's a smaller sum but very old.
Also, I thought DPR had much less than 400k coins...

This can't be it, these are brand new coins...

It's probably a bunch of small transactions. As mentioned on reddit, the big 2009/2010 miners usually kept each 50 BTC block reward in a separate address, so it's possible the mystery whale moved them out in separate transactions for each address.

In this case you can actually tell that it's old coins.
The total output volume yesterday was about 1 million BTC, which is below the recent average. The days destroyed were about 134 million, which is WAY above average. Therefore you can assume that most of the coins transacted were "regular" young coins, but some of them were very very old.

To back this up, blockchain.info has a feature that filters days destoryed by coin age. If you filter with a minimum of 1 year, those transactions account for 131 million out of 134 million total days destroyed yesterday. Since most of the coins moved on an average day are just a few days old, this further suggests that a significant amount of coins more than 1 year old were moved.

Assuming no more than 100,000 old coins are involved (probably much less), they would have to be at least 3.5 years old. So it seems likely that a very big miner from 2009/2010 just moved a lot of coins for the first time since mining them.

Please correct me if I'm wrong here, but if there are outputs under 5430 satoshis the transaction will be considered non-standard since 0.8.2. Will a higher fee help?

EDIT: Never mind, it now looks like the original transaction with 0.0001 fee was confirmed somehow...

It's the very definition of funny money  

But Dogecoin is not just based on a meme, it is a meme itself. Therefore, it will follow the rules of memetic epidemiology - rise exponentially for a while, then disappear.

I think this poll is irrelevant, because belief doesn't enter into it. That's the beauty of scientific facts - they're going to stay the same, no matter what you think about them. The world is going to stay round even if you really believe it's flat.

As for the policy enacted in regard to these scientific facts, that's something we should all debate. We're all entitled to our political opinion, and we should certainly have our say when it comes to responding to climate change. Hence, a better poll might ask whether or not we believe in carbon regulation and taxation, cap and trade schemes, alternative energy subsidies, and other such environmental policy. But whether or not we believe in the existence of anthropogenic climate change is entirely irrelevant.

Not to mention, the bitcoins he stole are worth much, much more than 1.3 million USD.

Unfortunately, the Zerlanian calendar differs from the Gregorian one in that "January" means August and "Two weeks" means a year.
Someone should really write an app that automatically translates Zerlan time to regular time, just to give BFL fans some reasonable proportions.