I think it's important to make a distinction between Bitcoin and Blockchain. Bitcoin is the revolutionary money, blockchain is the pile on by con artists that inevitably follows. I won't defend the sh!tcoins but it's too easy to poke holes in the luminaries argument.

"It's not secure"

Elliptic Curve/SHA are generally accepted as secure.

"it's not decentralised"

Distributed systems concept and design are well defined and multiple competing miners, validating nodes and wallet software that all operate using a peer to peer protocols certainly fits the definition of decentralised. Coupled with fair distribution and no leaders I'm not sure there is a purer example of decentralisation that exists today.

"Any system where you forget your password and you lose your life savings is not a safe system,"

Any system can be used in an unsafe way. Life savings should be stored using multi-signature 2 of 3 multisig for example with 3 seeds stamped into steel and transactions signed using an air gapped signing hardware such as seed signer for example. How many pensions have been lost due to market crashes and failed businesses. Weak argument.

These authoritative tech leaders are not all that impressive. Their comments are dumb and uninformed and will do a great deal of harm to the uneducated who follow them unless they nuance their arguments by acknowledging Bitcoins unique status.

The battlefield 2142 community has been experiencing global lag issues over the past weeks with no response from EA/Dice. Their customer support is virtually non existent, and they are expecting everyone to pony up for Bad Company 2. This has all the hallmarks of a business ready to implode. I just hope that this recent announcement is to free up server space for a growing battlefield community and not just to boost shareholder profits.

Didn't we (Britain) solve this problem already when we colonised Australia? Sending criminals is the answer!!, we don't have to worry about them dying and they get the freedom of Mars!. voila! Lisa Nowak might be a good candidate...