[pipermerriam]

Disclaimer. I have skin in the game. I've been developing on the platform since the Frontier launch and I have some Ether holdings.

1. Checksums are available via the mechanism in https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/issues/55

2. I don't have any experience mining. Maybe someone else can answer this.

3. If I recall correctly, this is being fixed in Serenity. Transaction validity will no longer require ether to be submitted with the transaction allowing miners to accept transactions that are paid for during their execution.

4. Ethereum only left Alpha/Beta on March 14th 2016, roughly two months ago. Until then there were clear warnings posted that there were likely to be bugs. I'm not aware of anyone losing money due to protocol errors. The losses I've read about are predominantly user error and errors in 3rd party software.

5. This seems like a clear lack of understanding of the intentional design of the system. If you could directly make HTTP queries from smart contracts it would be impossible to reach consensus on what the result of code execution was because two clients could get two different responses from the same query. Everything that the EVM executes has to be 100% deterministic. Take a look at http://www.oraclize.it/ for an example of how communication with the outside world can be done.

I hope that clears things up.