Confirmations are needed so that you know that the chance of a double spend is close to nothing. Double spends aren't as easy as you think, it's quite a hassle and not worth if used for small transactions. The risk is for the seller, but he can take into account the chance of some losses because of this. And with bigger transactions it would be wise to wait to see a few confirmations.

Edit: typo, clarification

By reading all this, it can be concluded that Bitcoin as a way of paying, has little impact on the price. Would that ever be possible? I mean, would the Bitcoin price change if it would be used to pay employees and they would use it again to pay for groceries as the dollar or euro would?

But why invest in them? There can't be that much money in it, right? If so, then everybody would join until nobody can profit anymore. On top of that it is most of the time exchanged for BTC anyway.
I think newbies should be very aware of the fact that most of the alt coins are pump and dump schemes. Only a few are really different and worth investing in.

Do Coinye and Doge coin have any new features compared to Bitcoin?

Look at my website.

A1 - I know the wallet.dat file contains a pool of addresses, so if you don't use a lot of addresses it wouldn't be necessary to backup. But I would do it anyway if I were you, because it could happen. Also your new wallet.dat file contains previous transactions, that way you know what your balance is.
A2 - You can do that right away, because you own the change address.
A3 - For the ones not tech savvy, they shouldn't be bothered dealing with different addresses I think. Maybe it isn't perfect yet, still waiting for some killer app.

That's happening already with mBTC, uBTC, and satochi. Which are respectively 0.001BTC, 0.000001BTC, and 0.00000001BTC.

It helped me to get introduced in Bitcoin. It was fun to watch my account go from zero BTC to 0.1 BTC (was back in 2012). Soon after that I just bought a few. But ask yourself, is it worth your time to get paid 0.5 dollar in three days.

I'm curious how much longer the alt coin clones will continue. Isn't it kind of obvious that those are doomed to fail? I know as long as money can be made from it, people will try to get a piece of the pie. But for all the people that profit from it, there are also people who lose money. BTW, I'm not talking about the alt coins that are offering other functionality or work differently, I'm talking about clones here. IMO they're just a wasted of time.

Only if those add functionality, it not just decreases because more options are available.

Don't be stupid. It was a hypothetical question what would happen if internet would be split in multiple networks, with multiple block chains.
Note the words large scale war and World War.

You can also use the testnet version of Bitcoin.
Testnet

No service is really free. I know miners are rewarded by the block reward of 25BTC, but that's just to kick start this endeavour. In my opinion the whole fee system is working just fine, preventing the network from flooding and securing the future of Bitcoin by making sure people still want to mine.
There is no way you should connect mining to the exchange rate. For example banks can also not be held accounted for the exchange rate of say dollar/euro. That is complete nonsense.

Internet could be broken up into some isolated parts. The weak points are the submarine communications cables. Those are few in number (relatively). Other ways to cross seas and oceans, such as satellite, will quickly be confiscated by governments.
In case that after such an event two different block chains exists and connectivity is restored, I think the block chain which is the longest will be chosen. That is, if same protocol is used.
All transactions done in the other block chain will be worthless, and also the miners will lose all there earnings.
Double spending shouldn't be a problem, because then you would've access to both networks. And that isn't possible according to the assumptions.

First of all, if you find a block then you've already solved it. The next question is interesting, I used this site to solve it. With 2.9Ghash/sec it would take an average of 84042 years and 139 days to find a block. So essentially it's telling you to don't solo mine.

Funny how people always think that they are entitled to money, welfare, food, shelter, roads, jobs, etc. It is quite rare how easy it was/is to make money out of Bitcoin. Nobody is entitled to anything, work for it and you get paid for what you're worth.

Why fix it? They (probably) got it fair and square. I am, however, very interested if the Bitcoins presumably attributed to Satochi Nakamoto's ever going to be used. That would have a great impact onto the ecosystem.

No.

Catchy title, could be a good book once.

You should think that's it quite logical that mining is not profitable. For the time it is, people would jump in. When it's not people won't take that jump. It will always balance itself to the point it's going to cost as much as you can earn with it.
Given that the price of Bitcoin not really correlates to the cost of mining, the only hope of it becoming profitable again is an increase in popularity of the coin.