Ridiculous. You can't agree to anything just by being born; you aren't even sentient at that point. There is no meeting of the minds, no clear agreement. If this so-called "social contract" existed, it would be a contract of adhesion which no human being in history ever explicitly agreed to, and any competent court would throw it out with prejudice after a cursory hearing.

On the contrary, there is no need to adjust the quantity of money to reflect population growth or GDP or anything else. The value of the money will adjust automatically based on supply and demand; it's impossible to have a shortage or surplus, as the units are arbitrary and have no direct use apart from serving as money. Changing the quantity of money in an attempt to regulate the price ruins an extremely useful economic signal regarding the demand for money and the balance between consumption and investment, leading to overconsumption and/or malinvestment.

Bitcoin is inflationary for now—any new currency must be, during the initial distribution phase—but over the long term the supply will be relatively constant and the price thus will be fully determined by the demand for bitcoins. Variations in the price will thus signal changes in the demand for money—to the extent bitcoins are used; the effect is diluted by the presence of other, centrally-managed currencies—which in turn informs the market about which investments are better or worse than average. Assuming a growing economy, any investment which does not outperform the expected price deflation is worse than average: investing in it would reduce the rate of growth. Under forced inflation there is more investment, but some of it is malinvestment, driven by the fact that simply holding the money causes it to lose value (artificially, due to the increased supply), and thus contributes to a lower average return and a poorer economy.

One could argue that the entire universe as we know it is nothing more than "an invention of the human mind", leaving no scope at all for discovery, but that is hardly a useful position to take in this context. Even if you did take that approach, mathematics should still be excluded, because mathematical relationships exist independently of human thought. The ratio of a circle's radius to its circumference is tau, and would remain tau even if no human ever existed to discover that fact.

Invention implies an element of creativity, deliberate choice among the available alternatives. The only choices in math are in the selection of axioms. Mathematical axioms may be invented (under significant constraints necessary to keep the results applicable to the physical universe, though there remains some flexibility), but everything beyond that follows mechanically from the axioms—and is thus discovered. Similarly, once your requirements are known, developing a software algorithm comes down to little more than solving the system of constraints described by the requirements—given the requirements specified in a formal language, this is something that could be solved in principle by a search through the solution space using tools similar to mechanical theorem-provers. Intuition helps in narrowing the search space (at the cost of possibly missing the solution entirely), but it isn't essential given sufficient time and memory. Of course, an actual program includes additional elements such as comments, identifiers and code style which are chosen by the programmer and have no effect on the program's behavior; these creative elements would be invented rather than discovered.

Science, moreover, is not "purely an invention of the human mind" any more than mathematics is. It consists of both discovery and invention. Science is essentially the process of making observations and developing statistically consistent models. There is more flexibility here than in math; models can fit the data to a greater or lesser extent, and the best-fitting model is not always the most useful. A useful approximation can thus be considered an invention; just the same, most of science consists of discovery rather than invention of new models, even more so when the goal is simply to fit a standard statistical model to the available data, pure math combined with discovered observations.

The algorithms have been known for about 30 years, but they've always existed as a solution to the problem Bitcoin was intended to solve, waiting for someone to discover them.

In that case, the correct word is "discoverer". The name Bitcoin was invented, but the fundamental algorithms with which Bitcoin solves the distributed ledger problem have always existed; it just took someone asking the right questions to discover them. You don't invent solutions to math problems, you discover them, and that goes for software algorithms just as much as any other form of math.

Scarcity is a fundamental requirement for any currency. It's either natural due to physical scarcity, as in gold, or artificial, as in bitcoin or US dollars or most other currencies in common use. Any digital currency will have the property of artificial scarcity, because information is not naturally scarce. Ensuring that scarcity is maintained without reliance on a central authority is what the blockchain is all about. The only significant difference in the form of scarcity between bitcoins and dollars is that one is governed by a fixed and unbiased mathematical formula, while the other is dictated by politics and thus unpredictable and subject to corruption.

You can complain all you like about "unfairly" enriched early adopters, but I for one would much rather have that than unfair enrichment based on one's political connections. When bitcoins come into existence they're distributed by a scrupulously fair lottery with proportional odds to people doing useful work for the network. When dollars are produced they benefit first with the authority to order them, and then those who decide how they're distributed, then finally the banks and government contractors and employees who get a chance to spend them before prices adjust to the increased supply; at each stage there is plenty of scope for self-enrichment through manipulation of the flow of new money.

Anyway, if you really want to trade traditional currencies online (as credit—the closest you're likely to get to trading the actual currencies), the reference client and server for Ripple are open source under the ISC License. Such a system can't be completely distributed, of course, since it's tied to external centralized currencies, so it's no substitute for Bitcoin; Ripple solves a different, and easier, problem by dealing in loans rather than assets, leaving it up to the users to decide how much credit to extend.

Either the buyer's buyer was also informed about who the original manufacturer was, or the initial buyer/reseller is obviously committing fraud. But that has nothing to do with the original transaction, which was not fraudulent and harmed no one.

Sure. Why not? Who would be harmed? Certainly not the buyer, who knows exactly what they're getting. Who else would have any standing?

I see your point regarding basic FDM printers, but note that for the right price you can 3-D print in steel, ceramics, wax, and more, or print a mold from which you can cast various other materials, including silver, brass, and bronze.

That's not an argument against selling copies, that's an argument against claiming that they're the originals. So long as the buyer is aware of who actually made the item there is no fraud.

It's worst than that. Not only can the program MITM SSL/TLS connections on the infected machine, so can anyone else in a position to intercept the traffic. The private signing key employed by the program is public knowledge at this point, and the same on all infected systems.

Your opinion is irrelevant here. Of course you're OK with it; you're one of the negligent freeloaders driving up costs for everyone else! It's the more careful credit card users who don't deserve those costs that are harmed by this system.

For that reason, the laws requiring a high default level of protection should be repealed. You would still be free to get a card from a bank offering "gold-plated" fraud protection, for an unsubsidized premium fee, while others who are more responsible with their cards can forego the fees in exchange for performing their own due diligence.

Then you will be glad to learn that it is absolutely impossible for any language to cause physical harm as a direct result. In your prior example of "inciting violence", the language wasn't the cause of the harm, the violence was the cause of the harm; and the cause of the violence was the listener's choice, not the speech, or the speaker.

The freedom of speech naturally extends to all speech. Your freedom of speech is respected if and only if you can say whatever you want to say without any change in your legal status. Social consequences are, of course, another matter entirely.

forEach(iterator, function):
..if (!iterator.at_end()):
....function(iterator.get())
....forEach(iterator.next(), function)

A better question would be: How do you implement a loop construct without recursion?

Keep in mind that recursion is nothing more or less than the ability to return to a previous point in the control flow of a program. The stack overhead associated with a lack of tail-call optimization and the special treatment of iterative constructs are merely implementation details, whereas recursion is a fundamental concept in computer science without which most programs would be impossible to express.

I realize you were joking, but there isn't really anything conceptually difficult about recursion. It just means that part of the program refers back to itself. Whenever you have self-similarity in the program's control flow, including the trivial case of repetition, you have recursion.

I think part of the problem is that most students are introduced to specialized loop keywords and "the" stack (a mere implementation detail) first, and only exposed to explicit recursion later as an "advanced" concept. Recursion should come first. Really, which is easier to understand:

void iterative(int n) {
..while (n > 0) {
....print(n);
....n = n - 1;
..}
}

void recursive(int n) {
..if (n > 0) {
....print(n);
....recursive(n - 1);
..}
}

From a modern compiler's point of view (with support for tail-call optimization) these examples are exactly equivalent, but the recursive version doesn't require an understanding of mutation, which is counter-intuitive for many beginners, and makes the control flow explicit where the "while" statement hides the control flow behind a special keyword.

Under the system I described, the insurance company can provide any level of access required. Even a full database dump, if necessary—just make sure it's locked down so that such requests can only come the agency needing access. If they want to use their own transfer protocol, arrange for a hardened proxy server and do whatever protocol translation you need at that point. If your database gets hacked through an insecure interface demanded by some external agency, there will be a log entry recording that proxy as the source and everyone will know who is to blame.