The word fiat means "by decree". A fiat currency is one that is decreed to have value by a government. Bitcoins derive their value by market consensus. They are the opposite of a fiat currency.

Miners don't have access to their reward for 120 blocks, so they never had them in the first place. The rewards will instead go to the miners in the new chain. Again, no coins are lost.

What? This is "news for nerds." The story is about an interesting technical development world's first decentralized all-digital currency. This is fascinating stuff. Any nerd worthy of the name should know all about this.

Litecoin will have the same problems. It's simply of fork of the reference bitcoin code with a few tweaks (more frequent block generation, use of scrypt instead of sha256).

It's a decentralized, trustless value storage and transfer protocol that allows you to send or receive value to anyone on the internet without the need of a third party. It has the potential to do to banking what email did to the post office.

It should be noted that nobody lost any coins, except for miners who lost their reward for mined blocks on the abandoned (v 0.8) chain.

Any transactions made on the 0.8 chain were automatically re-included on the 0.7 chain when it became the main chain.

If your job requires you to travel throughout the country, you cannot walk hundreds of miles between cities. If you need to get quickly from LA to Boston because your mother has suddenly taken ill, hitch-hiking your way wouldn't be much of an option.

In most cases, the only practical way to get around is by car, plane, or train, and each method requires papers. (Yes, you can mostly get around in your car without having to show anybody papers, but how long before cars are tracked through methods electronic or otherwise?)

So for most people who lead normal lives, you really do need papers to travel.