Shamir's paper is bullshit (RSA and SSSS are cool, though). 98% of bitcoins belong to exchanges or web wallets that manage money for their users. This distribution says nothing about actual users and there is no way to find this out. Yes, technically there are big "owners" of a lot of coins, but that's temporary delegates, not primary investors. Also, by scanning HTML printout of blockchain from block explorer they only demonstrated their incompetence in this matter - blockchain is always readily available for analysis in bitcoind.
Unfortunately, the state is cutting the tree they are sitting on. Their massively inflated money supply is going to hit them hard when China and other foreign nations will refuse to accept USD as a reserve currency and all that printed nonsense will hit US economy and destroy it by hyperinflation. Or, USG will put up massive capital controls to avoid that thus closing the country in an iron curtain. Considering that externalised inflation destroyed a lot of production inside the country, isolating people from global market will also destroy what remains of the economy. In no theory it is sustainable in the long run to print shitload of money and not have its value massively dropped at some point of time. Each day it doesn't happen only makes the inevitable hit harder.
Once people all over the world start tasting Bitcoin and moving savings off fiat currencies, they will naturally hyper inflate - people will be trying to get rid of them quickly. This has nothing to do with orders of the state: it'll happen legally or illegally. And policemen will be among those people who try to save what's left of their savings.
Also: did you notice what Obama said when he asked Congress to raise debt ceiling? He said he wouldn't be able to mail the social security cheques. In other words, he admitted that there's absolutely no money that was extracted from people is available in form of cash or real investments. That he must have to issue new debt to pay that debt. Isn't it a good enough proof that the whole monetary system is going to collapse any time Link: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x14y4cx_obama-tells-america...