FreeMoney, I think it is crucial to have fast local transactions. It is needed for many businesses and person to person payments.
10 minutes or even 10 seconds is too slow. An extraterrestrial system was just an extreme example.

The most pressing problem, as I see it, is to get a digital cash system that makes it possible for people and small businesses to pay each other fast and without
registration and supervision from a big company/government.

I read the thread about vending machines. There were no real solutions except companies that would monitor for double checking in a few seconds. I agree that would be possible,
but we would lose the whole point of not having an issuer. This company needs to be trusted, it will break anonymity, and people need an account with that company.

What is wrong with the follwing "standard" system. A central bank/government issues a currency like today. It sets up servers around the world to validate transactions.
People pay each other by means of a single verification with one of the centeal bank's servers. The speed issue is solved by coins having the location of the relevant server embedded in them. In worst case, the server would need to make long round trips to other severs, but in most cases the first server would know the answer already. The cental bank could have an algorithm for distributing coins around the network to optimise latency and server load. The wallet would have an algorithm for choosing the most local coins when making a payment.
The wallet could also prepare by exchanging coins with the server. On your way to Europe, the wallet replaces "American coins" with European coins, such that payments will be fast in Europe. For the user, this is incredibly easy. It is anonymous, and it requires no agreements with any processing companies.
Also, there could be many issuers of the same currency if so desired.

Bitcoin gets rid of the issuers, but instead introduces unacceptable slowness or a lot of middlemen like credit card companies/debit accounts etc. Satoshi's solution, on the vending machine thread, with a double spending checking company is still too slow, even though faster than a block, and this company needs an omnipresence on the network almost like
an issuer.

But discarding speed, bitcoin seems extremely elegant. And of course there are uses for this kind of system. One could imagine many local bitcoin systems with an exchange between
different currencies. That would work except that an attacker can take over a small currency.