Someone versed in ECC timeline should sift through the appropriate meeting minutes on certicom site, perhaps they already hint at how parameters were chosen.

Articles also mention hardware backdoors and other weaknesses being implanted by the NSA agents. This is in addition to purposefully weakened crypto standards, examples of Windows OS backdoor (_NSAKEY), backdoored "standard" PRNG (dual_EC_DRBG), etc.
It appears that NSA is not in the business of national security, but in the business of mass surveilance and subversion of good, public crypto. Their "recommendations" of any specific constants or crypto techniques should be seen in this light.
I don't think they particularly care about Bitcoin - they might if it ever becomes significant in the international trade - but Bitcoin may become a collateral damage if secp256k1 was in any way influenced by the NSA shills at SECG. If secp256k1 does not include nothing-up-my-sleeve numbers, we have every reason to ask for an expert review.

Bitcoin uses standard, NIST (and likely NSA) recommended curve parameters. Are these chosen based on some rationale, or just chosen, ahem, randomly by, ahem, unknown people? Was there any obvious danger in using different constants?

ECDSA curve parameters in Bitcoin are standard ones, recommended by NIST. I wonder where they came from. Is there any rationale behind these particular constants, or they magically appeared out of nowhere, akin to dual_ec_drbg?

Making good crypto is difficult. The majority of people today do not use cryptography intentionally at all. Bad crypto is better than no crypto, with added benefit of straining the resources of the mass-surveilance machine.

Most of you are by now hopefully familiar with the latest revelations of the U.S. government agencies planting backdoors in software, hardware, and 'standard' algorithms; stealing and using corporate encryption keys; intercepting, decrypting, and storing SSL traffic.
Read here, for example:
 http://www.propublica.org/article/the-nsas-secret-campaign-to-crack-undermine-internet-encryption#odni-response

Time after time we were told to avoid attempts to develop own crypto methods and instead use published standards. There are compelling justifications behind this advice.
Standardized crypto, on the other hand, obviously enables standardized, automated surveilance by a sufficiently powerful agency that has either built subtle weaknesses into the standards, or has discovered them later on. The surface of their attack is small and well defined, and resorces at hand are enormous.
In a security-through-obscurity world, this universal threat would be eliminated, as no agency has sufficient resources to figure out each and every implementation - no matter how clumsy the implementations are. This would require lots of manual labor, and would in effect force them to use resources for targets that are actually of the national security interest, instead of spying on everyone and everything, inevitably leading to the abuse of collected information for the non-national-security purposes.
 What the free world needs now is the popularization and proliferation of a variety of cryptographic, steganographic, and security techniques, DIY projects, and generally a crypto culture. We should avoid mainstream, standardized solutions, and always opt for the new and obscure, preferably with a DIY mods. If you feel you need to establish a secure channel of communication - why, just build one as an appropriate mix of code, steganography, encryption, one-time pads, fragmentation, etc. If you don't feel you need secure channels - why, still use any of  the methods just for the spamming pleasure.

What exactly are you thinking of when you write "exploit" or "break"? There is no encryption in Bitcoin. There is nothing to "break". They certainly have backdoors in most software, open source included, and in most hardware. All they could do with an undisclosed weakness in sha256 is to start mining faster. Why would they care about being able to mine faster? If they know of a weakness in ECDSA, they could spend my coins. Again, why would they care?

Don't spill the beans... this will be a business oportunity some day. Interplanetary cross-chain brokerage.

There is a relatively large spread on some - virtex, for example. Last price fluctuates several percent simply depending on the last trade being a fill of a buy or  a sell order. What Jan describes sounds better, if I understood it correctly.

You have just demonstrated the problem. It is not per month, it turns out it is per day. And average person cannot see right away if we are talking millions or tens of millions or hundreds of thousands in this pile of digits: 37049113.99417443 - they need to stare it into pieces. Common sense, it doesn't take a PhD in graphic design.

Can we please have redesigned graphs? Here are examples of what could be improved, mostly related to readability:

Help me understand this.  Assume no mining is done.  I could still broadcast a transaction from Mars, right? It would take several minutes to get to Earth, and terrestrial miners would then include it whatever block they are working on. Once the block is made and broadcast, I would receive it with a delay, and would be able to check the validity, broadcast it locally, etc. Where is the problem?

Moreover, the ideas in OP are justified by a nonexistent problem.

Much better.

Also note that, given A, you can still choose to do B. Just like government fiat - it still works great for illegal purposes. Therefore, option A is a win for everyone.

This is correct.

I was there, and I should add: it did not degrade scanning accuracy either.

I haven't thought this through, but would it make sense to include fiat amounts in the transaction history? I mean the actual historical worth, not the based-on-today's-exchange-rates worth. If you are already storing transaction data locally, adding this field would be trivial. If you are pulling the list from the server based on address(es), it might be too much work.

A Clockwork Vodka.

Oranges of that kind were marketed successfully.

OK, that part was just meant to provoke a response from those who define communism in different terms from mine. Having lived under a communist party rule, and having never been involved with the communist party in any way, I like my definition better.  But we stray from the topic.
Again, as others have pointed out, with fiat we have practically infinite, monopolized supply of money. With Bitcoin, we have a fixed, democratic, consensual, and mathematically exact supply. Distribution of wealth in these two scenarios has a different meaning, and straight-forward comparison is meaningless.
I fail to see a problem. Bitcoin works and allows me to represent, store, and exchange value in ways never before possible. Alice, Bob, Satoshi, and Mugabe can do with their coins as they please, and Gaddafi may have taken half a million brain-walleted coins with him into the grave. Seriousy. It's not like you'd have a clue. Some people do have lots of coins, some people did have lots of coins, and yet here we are, and world hasn't ended.