There's no reason to force a choice between CPU and GPU and opencl is likely the best choice for scheduling and partitioning the work.  A couple CPU cores could be used to pre-initialize the initial work state before being queued for hashing in a GPU command queue.  If it's a CPU-only kernel, you can still make use of calls to inline-assembly in the host program for the opencl kernel(s) if you want (and can do better than SSEx optimization).  Have fun with it.

You can take the programmer out of C but you can't take C out of the programmer.  Nice catch.  Further improvements are possible  though if you don't mind coding for specific GPUs with AMD-specific optimizations.  Thanks for sharin' though.

It's built into the protocol, not the block-chain.  The protocol dictates the change in 'difficulty' based on how long it takes the hashing pool to find the next 2016 blocks; the protocol is designed around this taking 2 weeks.  If it takes less than two weeks the new 'difficulty' will be higher than if it had taken longer than two weeks.  In either case, the difficulty will continue to increase until it becomes mathematically impossible to mine new blocks.  By design, this will happen after the (I believe) 5,120,000th block in the chain has been found.

At that point the difficulty should be greater than the size of a block hash.  So it's the increasing difficulty that ultimately determines the number of coins in circulation, not anything inherent in the block-chain.

That's not a whole lot of information to go on.  It'd be helpful to know more about your hardware and software setup.  How many graphics adapters (including any APU) are in the system?  The mention of "more than one display" suggests you're running linux; if so, make sure you have all the dependencies met.  Also, you might have better results  just from using the latest version of cgminer (3.11.4 I believe).

Market manipulation?  Maybe electric companies saw a noticeable drop-off when gpu miners shut down when it was costing much more to mine than gpus could earn.  So they hire and fund a firm to get gpu miners back on the meter.

Accidental?  Someone's trading bot's algorithm is off by a decimal point causing chaos at the exchange.  It's happened more than once on wall street..

Supply < Demand?  People notice the market value trending higher so they place an order to sell at some ridiculously high asking price relative to the current market.  Then a large buy order engulfs all the sell orders and suddenly the market value soars to the formerly ridiculously high asking price.

Or one of many other reasons.

When it's made public it's no longer a prediction.  At that point it's called an advertisement.

Welcome to newbie limbo.  I'm still waiting for the ferryman too...

Unless things have changed in the past couple months, the namecoind cli is how you create transactions, manage your namecoin wallet and manage your .bit name registrations.

You'll also need some small amount of namecoin in your wallet to finalize your name registration.  If you want to mine them using the stratum mining protocol you'll need to find a multi-mining pool that support BTC and NMC over stratum.  Many multi-mining pools only support multi-mining for clients using the 'getwork' mining protocol so pick your pool and/or mining protocol carefully and start mining while namecoind initializes (downloads) the block chain.

The hashing algorithms for Bitcoin are based on the USA's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) published PKE algorithms.  These standards are proposed by technologists from applicable fields then reimplemented/refined over time based on peer-revue and ultimately public contests involving substantial prizes to the person/group that discovers a flaw and/or develops the fastest key-cracking methodology.  The Bitcoin algorithms use a sub-set of the published hashing standards for purposes they were intentionally designed for with the exception of using "little-endian" bit-order processing (a vestige of compiler/assembler addressing optimizations which can save space and increase throughput by reducing the size of block-aligned address indexes) as opposed to "big-endian" processing which is implicit in the published standards.

So it's safe to say that a government did develop Bitcoin technology.  Whether or not one also created the real-world application seems immaterial since the entire block-chain is easily obtained.  Anything from a person to a government can use the 'information' accumulated in the chain for any purpose that suits their needs.

It's surprising that Graham didn't suggest the possibility of Bitcoin being "digital currency 0.1 (alpha)" which could be observed with no responsibility by anyone to actually back or regulate.  Even in this case the prime-mover in fabricating the technological application is still irrelevant since anyone can make experimental observations on the currency and its exchange.

I'm not certain why the OP (or anyone) would presume governments would be the most likely suspects for control of the Bitcoin exchange rate when so many other suspects actually stand to gain from such market manipulation.

Just my 0.00000002 BTC.  The thread looked interesting and I can't seem to post/reply in any group but this one...