It only seems like a scam if you forget one of the main purposes of money: to provide liquidity. When a bank issues a loan, they require some capital in a non-currency form as collateral. This is typically (some proportion of) real estate or a company. The bank is effectively buying whatever the capital is, but giving you the option to have it back at a fixed price in the future. If the amount of currency in circulation could not expand to match the amount of capital then you have deflation and myriad other economic problems.

The protagonists in Cryptonomicon were planning on launching a new, private, currency backed by gold. They didn't ever work out that what they were really doing was attempting to launch an unregulated commodities exchange, which is something that most governments frown upon if the transaction volume exceeds a certain threshold.

There's no evidence of any historical societies that used barter. The first currencies were backed by far cheaper commodities, in particular by grain. Early metal-based currencies were just lumps of the metal. You made smaller denominations by cutting the coin in half, and you calculated its value by weighing it. This was problematic, because people could mix in cheaper metals. Later metal-backed currencies were effectively promissory notes: a bank kept the metal in its vault and promised to exchange a token for the metal if you presented the token. For example, the Pound Sterling meant that the Bank of England promised to exchange one pound coin or note for a pound of sterling silver. Fiat currencies then evolved because people realised that keeping a load of a commodity in a bank was not a very productive use of it (and made the value of the currency fluctuate randomly with the value of the commodity) when no one was actually exchanging the tokens for the commodities.

You can use commodities in a similar manner to currencies, but they are not currencies. The point of a currency is that it does not intrinsically have value in and of itself, but there is a strong belief by its users that it can be exchanged for something that does. This can be because a bank issued it and has a large pile of precious metal in its vaults that it promises to give you back in exchange, or because a country requires its citizens to use it to pay taxes and therefore there will be a demand for it equal to some proportion of that country's GDP.

The difference between a cigarette or a bottle of vodka and a currency unit is that the value of these commodities is defined by their utility. You can smoke a cigarette or drink a bottle of vodka. All that you can do with currency is exchange it for something else of value, on the premise that the person who receives it can do the same thing later.

Not necessarily a hipster, just someone who doesn't live in the USA. Here it's much easier to get around with a bike than a car and given the difference in cost, there's no real incentive to own a car. I've never got a driving license because owning a car has never seemed useful anywhere that I've lived.

Shame he didn't pay a bit more attention: Alan Kay was in Utah (Salt Lake City) when he came up with the idea.

In the UK (and, I believe, most of the EU), a car license can optionally include a motorcycle license and the cost is the same whether or not you tick the relevant box, so there's no reason not to get a license for motorcycles and cars when you apply for one for cars.

My mother got a new laptop just before Christmas that came preloaded with Windows 8. Over Christmas, she installed the 8.1 upgrade. The amount of swearing did appear to decrease very slightly, but it still did things like pop up the People app for no obvious reason (e.g. when she was in the middle of filling in a password in a field in a web page) with no obvious way of closing it, or send her to the home screen without making it obvious how she got back to the doing-stuff screen. The only way I found to get from one of the randomly popping up Metro apps back to whatever she was doing was hit alt-F4. Hardly the most discoverable UI I've seen...

Yes it is. The value of the dollar is established by the US law stating that it the US government must accept it in payment for taxes and that US citizens must accept it in restitution for debts. In contrast, Bitcoin has its value established by the belief among speculators that they can sell it for more than they paid.

Yes, Bitcoin is an alternative to fiat currencies. A fiat currency, by definition, has a fiat enforcing its value. Bitcoin, in contrast, derives its value from unregulated speculation. It's not a good alternative, but it is an alternative.

Open season on hunters and PETA members?

The grandparent said that his 9-year-old completed 50% of it. I'd have been able to complete 50% of several of my university courses at around that age (and, indeed, some of them were revision of things my father taught me at that age), but the remaining 50% was a lot harder. It's fairly common for 50% to be the high-level overview and the remaining 50% to be the detail. To understand the first half, you need to be reasonably intelligent, but to complete the second half you also need a lot of background knowledge (especially in mathematical techniques) that you probably don't have aged 9.

Jehovah's Witnesses believe that blood transfusions are immoral. Christian Scientists believe that most modern medicine is immoral. The Church of the Holy Buck believes that any treatment that negatively affects the bottom line is immoral. Should all of those be allowed to refuse to pay for any of them? If a religious organisation finds that it is immoral to perform a particular service, then they are welcome to get out of the business of providing that service.

No one is forcing churches to be in the insurance business and I can cite several passages from the bible, including quotes from Jesus and St. Paul that indicate that they shouldn't them. If they want to be religions, they can have any crazy rules that they want. If they want to be businesses, then they have to abide by the rules that apply to businesses.

While it's a pretty damning statistic in comparison to other first-world countries, it's worth remembering that a lot of other countries have lower incarceration rates because they flog or execute people for more minor crimes.

Depends on the gender and species of the person serving the latte, I guess...

I've not heard of this approach, but it does quite closely model how most adults read. You can substitute a lot of letters retaining the word shape without the reader noticing unless they're explicitly looking for errors. I suspect that it's not a very good way of getting from not-reading to writing though...