[Zidewinder]

People have speculated that this is an attempt by some attacker to correlate ownership of older and newer addresses en masse. Some wallets give the user no control over which address(es) are used as the source for any given payment. When a tiny sum shows up in some old empty address still being tracked by the wallet, those coins will eventually be sent on automatically as part of a larger payment, alongside coins from one of the user's currently active addresses, and suddenly the common ownership of those two addresses becomes public record.

[oscilloscope]

Most wallets only have the crudest tools to prevent identity attacks like this, such as setting a preferred address for the next payment. Frequently, you won't even see what the inputs and outputs of a transaction will be before it's broadcast to the network.

[ChristianMarks]

In that case, maybe publishing the addresses wasn't the most discreet thing imaginable. Still my "holdings" amount to a Starbucks card converted to BTC through an online service mentioned on HN. I wanted to motivate myself to become interested in Bitcoins, and thought that watching a miniscule amount might help, but the mischief around cryptocurrencies is demotivating. Cryptocurrencies should be regulated. Perhaps the Bitcoin will serve in the long run to address some rent-seeking behavior in the banking system. For now it's the Wild West.