Classical properties of money are: medium of exchange, unit of account and store of value.

Very few, if any, goods in bitcoin economy are sold using bitcoins as unit of account. Paying with bitcoin may be option, but goods are priced in other currency. Bitcoin prices are periodically adjusted to match price in other currency. Bitcoin clearly is not way to store value. Most people use it to speculate. Apart from limited use in paying small amounts of drugs for personal use etc. in local settings, bitcoin is not preferred medium of exchange. Because bitcoin is not used like money, it is not money. Currently bitcoin is just way to make payments (similar to debit or credit card) and speculative hobby for some.

Even very shaky third world currencies have some stability because people constantly need to buy them to pay taxes and fees. Only way I can see bitcoins becoming viable currency if some network communities or services would only accept bitcoins as payment. That would tie the value of bitcoin into something that has tangible value.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Von Neumann architecture quantum computer is not very usable. There is not any way to program it in a usable way. Nor there is way to get results out.

The biggest problem with digital I&C is the “software common cause failure issue"

Imagine modern nuclear plant with multiple-channel redundancy in instrument and control systems, if one instrument fails, there are others. Same applies to whole cooling systems, if one cooling system fails, there are other completely independent systems that continue to work. Typically redundant systems use instruments from different manufacturers or instruments that are implemented with different technology.

This is not possible for digital systems because they are too costly to implement multiple times. What this means is that redundant digital control systems use same software. If one system fails because of software error, others may follow. This has already happened in German nuclear plant that had new digital system installed. Only the old analog system that was still operational saved the reactor.

This is why Finnish radiation and nuclear safety authority required changes in Areva's plans for the most modern nuclear reactor being build, Olkiluoto 3. They added analog safety requirements. Reactor must be able to shout down even when digital I&C has total failure. Relying for all digital systems compromises redundancy.

More info:

http://www.neimagazine.com/story.asp?storyCode=2053091

http://www.amazon.com/Digital-Instrumentation-Control-Systems-Nuclear/dp/0309057329

Best way to get everything right is to order desingn from company that specializes for control room design. Yokogawa is pretty good.

Special suggenstions for computer hardware:

- Monitors from Eizo. They just make the best monitors for control rooms, medical imaging, etc. http://www.eizo.com/global/
- Matrox graphic cards are really good for control rooms. It's their specialty and they exel in it. You can get multi monitor worstations that are silent http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/

I'm a Finn. I know we fought well in WW2. It's what happened after the war that was submissive. It has even own word: Finlandisation

It all started after the war. Politicians knew that we would not be able to stand war against Soviets if we were the only enemy. They desided to play really really nice. Almost everything was OK as long as it did not involve Soviet troops in Finnish soil. It became liturgy to talk how good relations were between our countries. I think this was good idea at first. But then new generation of politicians grew, who thought that this good relationships bullshit was real. Soviets were able to influence our politics a lot. Finland censored talking, books and movies that were negative to Soviets. Some people even started to believe Soviet propaganda that we started the war.

The good part of all this was that we could keep our own economic system and democracy going (even if Soviets were able to mess with it from time to time). The cost of having western lifestyle next to Soviet Union was our pride. Cold war era was bad time for Finns.

That's implementation dependent, but I think most good Smalltalk and Lisp implementations do it like that. If you reserve two tags for immediate integers (one for positive, one for negative), you lose only two bits. Having 64-bit system, and memory access as bottleneck, that's incredibly good solution. Completely future proof solution even.