I won't say they're "figured out". Many A's are not very laid out very adequately, some aren't comprehensive and thoughtful. In the long run there are still many concerns; for example, network security scales with mining pay out which gets exponentially smaller, which is a sustainability issue of which the effects are not fully predictable. All in all it's still in experimental phase but the initial goal was noble and the outlook isn't too bad. I share you sentiment, however, that too many of the comments here are ill-informed.

Some people use it to say nay to strong statistical results backed by solid scientific investigation to causality, but the quote is exactly for you kind of folk who look at statistics, come up with their own theories and believe in them willy-nilly without ever thinking about the responsibility to go through the process of formal validation. Perhaps there's more junk food or even nutrition level in general. Perhaps parents don't have as much time to bring kids outside or guide them to play sports. Perhaps more people live in cities, where there's simply less space to run around; I live in a place where you need to queue overnight just to book an indoor basketball court, all year long. Perhaps the reproductive disadvantages of genes related to obesity have been alleviated by modern technology and some change in societal values, so obese offsprings have become more common. Perhaps there's a kind of commonly used product, not even food, that specifically induces some kind of hormonal disorder which leads to obesity. I can give you lots of possible explanations and none of them are any worse than yours.

You also have to know that the demographic that sits in all day, every day, to play video games is quite small compared to the entire population. Many kids play games, but it takes a certain amount of obsession to be indulged, that's why gaming nerds are always a minority. Either way in many cases I doubt videogames genuinely displaced exercise; given your data you can't say they'd otherwise have done more sports, a very significant portion could have still watched TVs or read a book or something. Moreover, it's not so easy for a teenager to become obese just because of lack of exercise; adolescent metabolism is high so it takes a middle-aged some regular aerobic exercise to match, and kids don't have that many years to build up their weight; there are often causes that played bigger roles, such as uncontrolled eating and stress.

I'm not exactly comparing JPY to BTC; I've mentioned many examples that a currency can be seen as such other than being non-volatile, and JPY is one. And also to refute your simplistic statement that instability is a cause to economic failure.

The thing is, in a way, you're basically saying BTC will fail because it's too small. Real world currency spreads are small because there's both large trading volumes and arbitrage is often easily exploited. It may or may not go away when it becomes larger.

It's not bad to compare BTC fluctuations to spreads at currency trading kiosks. After all, these kiosks survive, and I'd bet real money (not Bitcoins) that their total worldwide trading volume is more that that of Bitcoin. One of my key points was that BTC does not have to support a full-blown nation's economy to be seen as a viable currency. It only has to be usable in markets of enough variety and size.

Physical trading will be a de-link and the outlaws will use it. It kind of defeats the purpose of using public-key cryptography, but in that regard it's no worse than cash, and there may be some external incentives that push people to choose it.

Major currencies are stable because they are freakin' large and are often regulated. Apart from printing money the goverment can participate in the market directly to change the temporary prices. This happened many times when speculators were driving the prices crazy, like earlier for CHF. In the late 1990s speculators tried to pump and dump both THB and HKD, succeeding to break the Thai economy but didn't do so much to Hong Kong. Weak economy and currency volatility is more like a correlation than a one-sided causation. Besides, the current low volatility in most markets is actually a relatively new phenomenon. It is also noteworthy that many well established players in international commerce have their own ways to mitigate the effects of currenct fluctuation and regulate their businesses, such as using options and hedges and changing money flow strategies, or simply shoving it to the consumers. JPY has seen very high volatility as a currency recently but it doesn't kill commerce. It isn't easy but it isn't disastrous either. There are also many other accounts that the volatility risk is still mostly low compared to handling money in some countries with the most corrupt governments and banks. Many currencies of relatively stable countries actually have rather large spreads when traded in many places by normal people, so there are may ways people expect to lose money to price differences in buying or selling. If you are not building an entire comprehensive economy of a large country around Bitcoin, but rather aim to creep in to different markets worldwide, there's still a lot of room for growth.

It could take a long, long time before something is found to be useful. People have been studying prime numbers for a few millenia but it's only when computers came out that they attained rockstar popularity in the real world. The rest of mumber theory may have little direct use, but without a massive pile of those "useless" theorems and a bunch of very talented people who have explored the field so thoroughly you won't have good reason to believe that RSA does what it does. There are researchers who focus on practical research, but those can only be done on top of the soil of deep and broad fundamental research. Without fundamental research the practical guys would run out of ideas to exploit.

I share your sentiment but it's unfortunate this is the way the world has progressed.

People get hold of land when it's cheap, then a city is built around it. These landowners may have helped a bit to develop the city over generations, but ultimately it's the many other people who choose to come to the city and settled down that make the city a good place to live, and the land valuable. Early land owners reap the benefits of the increased economic activity on the land they own, then they become rich and powerful.

Up to a less peaceful level, wealth and power disparity induce revolution, but after every revolution the society is just reshuffled and new self-serving elites pop up the same way they did before. But over history, the lives of people are improving, and the world becomes a teenie bit fairer. Bitcoin may just be like that; it's all the same crap but overall it's a big change that might promise a better world.

I personally hope Bitcoin would fail but the many better versions of it would succeed, so that there is a better likelihood that things would turn out "fair".

At least that would give us better voters. Letting people recognize good political decisions is better than making them successful.

Didn't you see the phrase "lesser extent"?

1) Bitcoin can migrate to new crypto algorithms. The process may not be easy, but there should be enough time to buffer.
2) Eletronic cash systems do not offer anything close to the vision promised by decentralized cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin.

For 2), it is important to note that the "use of real currency" is far from immaterial. These real cash still have to pass through banks, and it is still ultimately a currency over which a central bank and by extension its government has full control, exactly the thing Bitcoin was trying to avoid. They can use "anything", but before Bitcoin this "anything" would also have been something controlled by a central authority, which in Mondo's case would be Mastercard.

There are many things to worry about Bitcoin, such as failing to properly maintain true decentralization, but some of your concerns aren't valid.

Unlike URLs, it's easy to brute force phone numbers from their hashes. Phone numbers are short and often have low entropy, from what I have seen the arbitrarily assignable part is usually no more than 8 digits, the rest being related to geographic region etc. Even with say 10-11 digits it is trivial for a GPU.

Many people are simply not so much exposed to these events / competitions, but still go on to become better students at undergraduate level and beyond.

They bring out talent from high school students, but at that point it is still far, far from real innovation. The problem setters and mentors are often university students anyway. These things encourage students to go beyond their high-school curriculum and think cleverly, so they have some great skills to use in industrial or academic settings. They are capable of entering the workforce, capable of joining and growing new businesses, but there is nothing special about their ability to "innovate". They still have a lot to learn, and in terms of cleverness there are many, many comparable university graduates out here.

Inventing really new things require some luck, and unless you're extremely lucky it would require extensive exploration. One page of new mathematics requires lots of thinking and learning. Even a prodigy like Erik Demaine spent 6 years on his PhD. Being smart doesn't mean you can always create something new - new, valid ideas are so scarce and hard to reach, and there is immense competition, so you still need to work hard for a long time to actually produce the results.

Can you still call it a killer app if it could only fill the intersection of three niches?