I'm sorry for his loss.

Someone will be traveling on those 8.5 BTCs, but it won't be your friend. 

A question:  Did he have two factor enabled?  I have two factor for BTCe login and 'three-factor' for BTCe withdrawals, Login + Google Auth. + Email confirmation.  I am curious if the malware out in the wild is sophisticated enough to get around those controls.

You are thinking along all the right lines, but my personal opinion is that older stuff tends to be more secure, or at least easier to understand, and therefore, to use securely.

My suggestion is to buy a cheap Dell laptop for $100 and just remove the hard drive and wireless card.  I wouldn't say your method is airtight, but using an old Dell as I have described would remove at least two possible attack vectors that, however unlikely, are still present it the scenario you presented.  Yes, of course something could be retained on you MBP hard drive, and yes, it could be transmitted when and if it ever does connect to the internet.  And if it has a built in wifi module, it could theoretically connect to a network even without your knowledge or consent.

Unless the electricity to run the miners costs more than the BTC they generate, people will run them.

Thanks deepceleron.  I had some trouble getting the client to recognize the bitcoin.conf file, but I'll try again.

Another question: Are instructions entered through the RPC interface retained if the client is shut down, then restarted?  For instance, would a node added through addnode be kept through a restart?

When I type "help" into the command line of the QT-client, the list of commands is different from the OP.  Where, exactly, would I enter the commands the OP listed?

Are you running OS X?  For a few years now, Apple has decided to measure amounts of data in base 10, and not in binary, as has been the convention since the beginning of computers.  As a result, any set of data will appear to be bigger when you use OS X to measure its size, at least when you compare the results to those generated by windows, linux, or just about any non-apple tool out there.

Giving them away is a great idea!  Go ahead, put 'Cubic Earth' at the top of the giveaway list.  I like those mermaids

I would wait a little longer.  Maybe send BTCe another ticket later this week.  If you don't see the money by next Monday and BTCe is not being helpful, that is when I would call your bank and try to figure out what is happening, though any 'reversal' would need to be handled by BTCe's bank.  Your U.S. based bank will be powerless to reverse an international wire transfer.  If the money is not back in you bank account by then, that would suggest it was accepted by the receiving bank.  Undoubtedly there are other banks in the chain though.  Keep us posted with how it goes.

I've had a decent experience with BTCe.  They are slow and terrible with customer service, but I haven't lost and fiat or bitcoins.

My first personal checks took over two weeks.  I would give them 10 days after the money has been pulled from your bank account, then start to apply some pressure though the help ticket system.  If 20 days went by after they pulled the funds from my bank account, then I would start to worry (and be a little pissed).

Nice sculptures.  I'm gonna have to wait a little while to buy one, hopefully when 1 bitcoin or less will be enough to buy the one I want.

I suppose $4.7m would be the maximum required to absorb the freshly mined coins at the $1300 price level.  But not all of the mined coins are put up for sale, so the fiat number could possibly be much less.

On the other hand, there would also have to be fiat available to buy any coins that holders decided to sell.  That number could presumably be between 0 and 12m (or whatever the current coin supply is) depending on the day.

So while you can think of the market cap being supported by a certain influx of fiat, I would argue it is just one variable out of a handful of important ones, and not really too helpful as a model unto itself.

Paste the private key under the 'Wallet Details' tab on bitaddress.org.  Make a change or three, then tell it to generate the new address.  If gives you an address, you made valid changes, if it says 'invalid private key', try some other changes instead.  There are just a few things you cant do, like using I, 0, l, 0,o.

I've used armory and the QT client to double check addresses, but it can be hard getting them to run off a live CD.  You could do all of this with a spare drive, then when you are finished, boot off the live CD and overwrite the drive with zeros several times.

Bitaddress.org could easily be compromised. 

Ask yourself:

How do you know the random number generator is truly random?
I would throw in a few manual changes to the private key it gives you.

How do you know the address are being correctly derived from the supposedly random private keys?
I would check the private key / address pair against other bitcoin software to make sure they match.

That's what I do at least.

It might depend on where you live.  If you are in the usa, Coinbase makes it incredibly easy.  Just link them up to your bank account.  You can sell 50 btc per day through them and they will put the funds into your bank account in a day or three.  At current bitcoin prices, that's over $350,000 per week.  There is also localbitcoins, which is all over the world.  You have to send a few emails and coordinate with someone to meet them, but I wouldn't consider that 'hell'.  Not as easy as getting fiat, not yet, but the situation not bad at all and getting better every week.

If you are in you 20's or 30's and have $500k in liquid assets and no debt, that is excellent financial security, at least in the US.  If your smart and frugal, you should be able to avoid money problems.  It would most certainly be enough to free you from being a working slave.  I'm not saying you wouldn't ever have to work again, but there are a lot of awesome jobs out there, especially seasonal stuff, like working in a national park or being a sailing instructor.  You could just earn a little here and a little there while you $500k grows and compounds.

Owning boats, a fancy Manhattan apartment, five star dinners every night, well yeah, that kind of lifestyle is going to take incredible amounts of resources to support.

My main financial objective is to maximize my freedom and security.  For me that means a simple life style, at least with respect to consumption, and big amounts of money / other financial resources.  In essence, living as far below my means as possible.

I'm 29.  People here are so damn smart, and such good writers, that I always imagine them to be 30's 40's and 50's.  But I'm sure a good percentage is 30 and under.

But just keep in mind that the realized capital gains contribute towards that $36k limit.  So if you don't have a job, and just sell $36k worth of your bitcoin stash per year, your would pay ZERO in taxes.  That's my understanding at least, but I'm not an accountant.

I think it is pretty obvious that Satoshi neither has nor wants an exit strategy.  He is not going to cash out.  What is an open question though, is what will he do if bitcoin grows to its full potential and becomes the entrenched global reserve currency.  Controlling 5% of the global reserve currency is better thought of in terms of power, rather than 'wealth', at least to the extent that those are separable concepts.  Will he chose to exercise the power and influence afford to him?  Or will his coins remain unmoved, and Satoshi unknown.  One thing he could do is provably destroy all his coins.  That would be a 5% - 20% gift (depending on the true coin supply) to every holder of BTC in a perfectly proportional manner.

Maybe the wealth haunts him.  He has done his service to humanity.  He could have the millions of dollars and a few already-mixed BTC to provide for his basic needs in life.  I bet if you were to ask around these forums, you would find many people troubled by their new-found wealth.  Not that they don't deserve it, or anything like that, but it can be isolating.  Especially if your friends, family, and community are not wealthy.  It would be quite difficult to be a multimillionaire and with paycheck to paycheck friends and not have that dynamic put some strange strains on normal social interactions.  

I hope no one takes offense to that.  I don't want to disparage Satoshi in any way, he is a genius and thus far conducted himself with total integrity.  My point is that he could be anyone, and it's okay for him to be anyone.  Bitcoin can remove the need for some types of judgements of character which have have until now been either necessary or just unavoidable.  If Satoshi did resemble the character I described, I wouldn't think any less of him.  Maybe the 'popping pills' part was a little over the top; whoever they are it's pretty clear they have, or at least had, all of their mental faculties in top working order.  That doesn't mean they don't use and enjoy mind altering substances regularly, but I would be surprised if they really let themselves go.

The dude could have be holed up in his parents basement, wearing dirty underwear and popping pills.  Truly amazing they have managed to amass so much wealth and their identity remains not publicly known.  That fact alone is a testament to the power of Bitcoin and an example of one of the many ways in which it is going to change the world.