From what I read, Ross had the wallet on his laptop with the "offline" money, when he was arrested by the feds (administering silk road from a coffee shop) The feds hired a UK firm to crack the wallet password, and that's how most of the money was seized.   They already had control of the silk road server before the shutdown, so it was trivial to get that wallet.

Compared to the decision making process behind a sovereign centralized bank currency, the rate of creation of bitcoin is much more known and tightly regulated than the creation of USD, for example.

Not correct.  The bitcoin network self-adjusts to keep the creation of new bitcoin on schedule.  From an investor's point of view, the creation of new bitcoin has a known, tightly self-regulated rate of creation.

Are you watching the console on cgminer?   It should indicate any problems you are having with the hardware or the stratum protocol.

The days of small miners making significant profits in pooled mining are probably coming to a close in a few years.   The economies of scale and efficiency will soon take over.

It's sort of the same situation with gold mining.   In 1849, you might be able to find gold nuggets in a creek in California and make a living at it.  Now, modern gold mining involves strip mining a vein of dirt with a high enough concentration of gold to make it worthwhile to refine a dump-truck full of that dirt into a bar of gold.

Before you get started, use one of the bitcoin mining calculators to figure out your potential profit running a rig.   The thing to keep in mind is that your average reward will decrease by 18% every two weeks, if the price of btc doesn't change.   The last difficulty increase was 22%, which reflects the new mining technology coming online.

I did some calculations on my Antminer S1, and if the price of BTC remains the same, I have about 20 weeks until the price of electricity exceeds the mining rewards, assuming an 18% biweekly increase in difficulty.

Assuming that you already had 51% control of the network, and at the current rate of $3 per GH/s for modern mining equipment, it would require about 15 million USD a week to maintain 51% control.   An entity that was large enough to have the initial capital and maintain that kind of cash flow is probably not going to be in the business of defrauding retail bitcoin transactions.

I'm not following the logic of why a government would want to do this.

Respectfully, I don't think you understand what happened to Iceland's banking system.   The crisis, which came to a head in 2008, happened because of deregulation of the banking system, and the people in charge of that system began buying toxic garbage bonds that were rated as AAA and created by the USA financial system.  They also got caught up in some currency trading problems with Europe during the global financial crisis (rather than investing in their own citizens).   The end result is that Iceland's banks almost collapsed, since the "collateral" no longer existed.   Citizens of Iceland were given a democratic choice, to either accept a Cyprus-style haircut, which would result in much of the money held in bank accounts to simply evaporate, or to nationalize the banks and institute capital controls to keep their currency from collapsing.

Capital controls are enforced by limiting the amount of money a citizen from Iceland can send overseas, such as transferring funds to a bitcoin exchange.  They really don't care about the bitcoins you possess.

I'm not sure what alternative to fiat you propose that they should have used, bitcoin wasn't released then, and even so, bitcoin's current market cap is less than $6 billion, less than 50% of Iceland's current GDP of $13.5 billion.

Why all this talk of "burning" coins?   There's nothing inherently illegal about bitcoin.   It would make as much sense as for the government to burn stacks of US currency seized in a drug bust.

The error in your thoughts about this is that it is immediately a criminal matter, as if you get arrested, thrown in jail, make bail, then let the IRS prove beyond a reasonable doubt that you violated the law.   It doesn't work this way, unless you clearly commit a crime that the IRS can prove in this manner.

The IRS begins by sending you a certified letter, claiming your return isn't matching reported amounts.  This happened to me, due to not including income from a 1099 for work done on contract.  They send you a bill with the corrected tax amount and penalties.   At this point, you can just pay it, and be done with it, like I did.

If you want to go to court and challenge the IRS findings, you get a lawyer and go to tax court.  This is a civil court, not a criminal court, and it's not "innocent until proven guilty."   If you lose, the judge issues an order that you pay.  If you don't follow the court order, then the court issues a bench warrant and you go to jail.   Proving that you didn't follow the order beyond a reasonable doubt is not a problem for the IRS.

The IRS relies on voluntary reporting, not a massive monitoring system.   If you want to cheat the government out of taxes, that's up to you.   The IRS currently examines returns at a rate of 0.7% for middle income earners.   If you cheat over 20 years, that's about a 25% chance of being caught.

It doesn't need to.  That's why you need to keep tax records for 7 years.   You provide the records if they challenge your claims on the return.   

After the events of 2008, where private institutional banking extorted the elected government of the United States to socialize their losses (while retaining private profits, not going to jail, giving themselves bonuses, and running scams with T-bills) incurred by selling toxic, bullshit financial instruments to the rest of the world,  I think the most problematic banking system in the world is obvious.  It's not in Africa.

Here's something to ponder, why a drop in hashrate is not likely:

Assume the current rigs composing the network hashrate were purchased at a price similar to the new rigs coming out, that is at $3 per GH/s, or $3000 per TH/s.  The actual value is much higher, considering the old technology that will still be online for a while.

Today, the network hashrate is 50,000 TH/s, which would correspond to $150 million dollars worth of new mining rigs.   95% of that is $142 million, and I don't see how you can make miners to turn off $142 million worth of equipment.

Not going to happen, unless you believe in a big magic internet kill switch.   

I think it's more disturbing to think that zombie miners are out there that continue running, making money for the electric power providers and not their owners.

It makes sense to me.  Consider this, that there are many African countries that have highly mismanaged centralized banks and unstable and corrupt political leadership.   Assuming that bitcoin grows to become a significant world currency, then bitcoin would make a lot of sense in developing economies on the continent.

If you obtain coins through a documented transaction, such as an exchange, or from a legitimate seller that has no problem providing a receipt, I'm sure the courts would have no problem with this establishing ownership.

Since the consensus of developers of bitcoin has made micropayments approaching 0.0001 btc impractical, there may be room for an alt coin that is more conducive to micropayments. 

When your floppy disk drives are disabled on the 29th of the month, you will know for sure.

http://wiw.org/~meta/vsum/view.php?vir=4

Apparently that's a really old virus from 1992!

Consider how long TCP IP4 has lasted, and the resistance to IPv6 adoption.   Bitcoin will stay on top for a while.