No, because a phone book doesn't actually look anything up, RAM does.
By that logic, CPUs don't calculate because they don't know how to do anything until they're instructed to do things.
That's the problem. The limited calculation that RAM can do is only useful for real-world crypto problems with amounts of RAM that wouldn't fit in any known universe. (Perhaps unknown ones are larger?)

I disagree. The way RAM works is if you feed it an address, a number, and you get a value out, a number. The essence of calculating is converting one or more input numbers into one or more output numbers, regardless of how you do it. A lookup table is a perfectly valid way of calculating things. If you feed two one-digit numbers into something and outputs their sum, then it calculated that sum, regardless of its method.

There are a lot of marginal miners now with older miners that make just a bit more than the cost of the electricity needed to run them. If the price of Bitcoin drops significantly, they'll stop mining. However, even though there are a lot of them in number, they probably don't represent a huge fraction of the mining power out there. Still, it wouldn't surprise me if difficulty temporarily dropped a bit if the price of Bitcoin, say, dropped by 30%.

There is almost no difference between calculating and storing/retrieving. A multiplication table can only store information, but it can also "calculate" products.

I see basically two questions:

1) Is it reasonable to expect transaction fees alone to ever provide enough mining revenue to keep the blockchain secure?

2) If the answer to 1 is no, will the Bitcoin community be able to come up with and implement a solution in time?

Altcoins basically collapse as soon as their block reward is too low to keep their blockchains secure. But it's reasonable to expect Bitcoin to continue to have a much higher volume of valuable transactions (and thus potentially more transaction fees) than any altcoin ever has.

I could see the Bitcoin blockchain being expensive and being used only for high value "settlement" transactions with most transactions denominated in Bitcoins happening off the block chain. That might be the solution. Though, arguably, that just makes the pool of potential fee-yielding transactions smaller.

Speaking for myself personally, I agree with you. I do see Ripple as a bridge. It's possible that the future evolution of money will be rippling among friends, but it's also possible that the future of evolution of money will be a trustless crypto-currency. It's also possible the future will be something none of us can think of yet.

The business plan we made for Ripple was the best we could come up with given the information available to us at the time. If you can think of a way we could do things better, we're all ears. We definitely don't expect to be doing the same thing forever. If there's no place for us in the future, so be it. Either Ripple Labs will do something else or we'll cease to exist.

Personally, I'm largely indifferent to the form future money and payment systems take. I see advantages of each, and both will likely improve dramatically over the next few years. The market will ultimately decide. Ripple was designed to meet present needs and to move in the direction its designers believed would be beneficial.

You have basically the same problem Bitcoin has. If everybody used it, it would be great. But not enough people have an incentive to adopt it to reach a critical mass. One of the things the new Ripple does different is focus, at least initially, on gateways.

Apple's business plan in creating each iPhone is to meet a current demand, a demand that they expect to be temporary. You can view each iPhone as a bridge that meets people's present needs and lays the groundwork for future products that meet their changing needs in the future.

I wouldn't take this analogy too far. But every business plan is a temporary thing. Ripple Labs doesn't expect to be doing the same thing forever and its current revenue model will almost certainly become obsolete at some point. That may mean Ripple Labs does something else. It may mean Ripple Labs develops the things that make it obsolete. You can only plan so far ahead.

If your point is that we're likely to explore other revenue models before our current one runs out, then I would absolutely agree with you.

When Apple builds a new iPhone, they make the old ones obsolete. Very few businesses expect to be able to continue with the same business model making the same products forever.

The problem is that there's a multi-trillion dollar market in "legacy fiat currencies" that we can't afford to ignore. There needs to be a bridge from where we are to where we want to be.

My recollection is that their escrow service, the crux of their revenue model, meant they were holding other people's funds which was difficult to do in their jurisdiction. Bitmit was awesome.

A coin has had a fair launch when the value goes to the people who created that value. If a coin doesn't involve the creation of any value at all, then all distributions are equally fair. You can't unfairly divide a zero. The early Bitcoin miners created the value they gained from their mining by making Bitcoin secure and usable.

The focus in the crypto-currency community on *dividing* value rather than *creating* value is disturbing to me.

I've been working on putting together a set of tools to securely generate and access crypto-currencies placed in cold storage. I've found almost all of the pieces I need except one. Something to allow people to store things like accounts and passwords for exchanges, private keys for crypto-currency accounts, and the like. Ideally, with a way for them to maintain them and permit another person to have access to them in the event of emergency or disaster.

I'll describe the ideal tool:

1) It would provide a secure editor that allows lists of private keys and/or passwords to be edited.

2) Encrypted data could be stored locally. Preferably automatically keeping past versions.

3) Unencrypted data would never be stored anywhere except in RAM while the program is running.

4) It would integrate with Dropbox, Google Drive, or something similar to permit synchronization of files.

5) The tool would be able to run on a PC as an application to access the local copy and not require Internet access. (Though, of course, it couldn't synch changes without Internet access.)

Ideally, a single easy-to-use tool would be best. This is intended to be easy to set up and use securely by non-technical people.

Any ideas?

That makes no sense, and common sense suggests the opposite. Which is more valuable, a crypto-currency that you can spend on Amazon or an otherwise identical crypto-currency that you can't spend on Amazon? The only thing that will make Bitcoins valuable for something other than speculation is value as a means of exchange.

Nonsense. That you can use Bitcoins to buy stuff on Overstock or Tiger Direct makes them more valuable than they would be otherwise. While people won't buy Bitcoins just to use on Overstock or Tiger Direct, people who buy Bitcoins for other reasons (such as speculation) will be more interested in holding them the easier they are to spend.

Consider someone who could accept a part of their salary in Bitcoins and who is marginally interested in holding them over the medium to long term as a possible investment. One barrier to holding them is the difficulty in selling them when they might wish to do so. Knowing they can use them to buy stuff increases their desire to have and hold Bitcoins. Otherwise, the demand they would create would not exist.

Still, it means a newcomer will find it harder to muster 51% of the hashing power. Of course, for all we know, 51% of the hashing power of Bitcoin (or Litecoin, or Dogecoin) could already by in the hands of a single party.

The NSA picked it. There is no known way to gimmick the base point.

The link is on the town's website. So if it's a scam, someone in the town's IT department is in on it or someone hacked their web site.

All you can do is wait a day until they get a new quota of SMS messages. SMS is a crappy way to do 2FA. Email is tolerable, but something like Google Authenticator is what you want.

Blah blah blah supply blah blah blah demand blah blah blah.