Go look at the top 250 addresses, a _majority_ of them have never been spent from. There isn't any conclusive proof that the #1 address (111,111 BTC) belongs to DPR, but it is clearly linked to SR in one way or another. I'd be willing to bet a solid amount of my own holdings that those coins are effectively "dead" (private key lost) along with a good portion of the rest of the addresses that haven't been touched since 2011, or have flat out never been spent from.

Everyone is touting the 12 million number for total coins in circulation right now and 21 million as the maximum amount. In practice both of those numbers are going to be significantly lower.

Because the people who were prescient enough to figure out that there was immense unrealised demand for such a system are surely anxious to offload their now increasingly valuable stake in that system, right?

I sure am, back when I was mining and buying at around the 1$ mark I thought to myself; self, you know this is all just games and popcorn, but there'll always be a bigger sucker out there and some day they'll come along and buy all this stuff you're now building, so suck it up and tolerate the jet engine whine of the fans, you'll be rich in the long run.

Not really, though.

Your fears are unfounded.

2 million coins were sold in the last 30 days: http://bitcoinity.org/markets/list?currency=ALL&span=30d and yet the price rose from $130 to $200... So a few extra "hundreds of thousands" of coins being sold would not have been able to significantly decrease the exchange rate.