Mathematician Dorit Ron and Adi Shamir (the "S" in the widely used RSA cryptography scheme) arrived at that finding by downloading the entire Bitcoin history and following the trail of some 180,000 transactions. They found there were about 3.12 million accounts, which are known as "addresses" in Bitcoin parlance. They belonged to about 1.5 different owners, on average, since there's no limit on how many addresses a single individual may possess. More than 609,000 of those addresses had received a significant portion of the outstanding BTCs without once making a payment, the researchers reported.

The lag in transaction times on MtGOX is infamous now, so much so that the official bitcoin IRC channel has a bot command that posts the lag in seconds and the distance traveled from the sun (measured in Astronomical Units) during that time.
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The lag is normally manageable, but during panic selloffs, it kicks in quickly, acting as a brake and halting any potential crashes, easing off when buying appears to be in vogue again. This isn’t nearly as great an issue when people are in a buying frenzy, despite what bitcoiners would have you believe. The lag is blamed on numerous things including high volume trading (this is possible,) a poorly coded backend (this is absolutely true,) and DDoS attacks (this is bunk.) Some also wonder if it’s not intentionally instated, acting as an emergency brake to keep the price up, keeping people trading and keeping MtGOX in business. During the last price drop, the site was actually taken offline, halting the crash (and any potential purchases) entirely.
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Normally, transparency is very difficult in the bitcoin world. But bitcoinstore is a special case, because they need to hit a certain dollar amount with their supplier in order to maintain the best possible discounts. Since they are nowhere close to reaching their goal, they put up a live chart on their website to show viewers how far they need to go. At the current market rate of $77, bitcoinstore has raised about $363,000. They need to hit $850,000 by March 31st, three days from now. This implies that they currently have around 4700 bitcoins in their wallet, or about 0.04% of all bitcoins in existence (1 in every 2,500).

From February to March, bitcoins essentially went from a low of $20 to a high of $95. That means that they essentially created $800 million in market value from thin air. For every dollar spent at the bitcoinstore, the market value of bitcoins has increased by $2000. This completely destroys the argument that the price of bitcoins are going up for any reason other than speculation. People are speculating on the idea that bitcoins are a useful currency, but the simple fact of the matter is, no one seems to be using them for anything other than silk road.