The thing being inflated in inflation is prices. If a currency becomes more valuable, things cost less in that currency. An appreciating currency leads to deflation, all else being equal.
(This assumes you are treating BTC as a currency, which appears to be the OP's intent.)
The article describes how this problem was present in Moped's BSON implementation, then fixed. Then later, Moped replaced its own BSON implementation with BSON-ruby, which had a version of the method which was not vulnerable. Later still, BSON-ruby's method was changed, making it vulnerable. BSON-ruby is, AFAICT, the official BSON library for ruby from Mongo.
As I understand it, the vulnerability is in any ruby application which uses a vulnerable version of the bson gem and which accepts object IDs from user input. You don't have to be using Moped.
I tested on our app (which uses BSON-ruby 1.9.2) and was surprised to find that the detection code indicated it was not vulnerable. Turned out it was because we also use bson_ext — bson_ext replaces the vulnerable method with a C implementation which doesn't use regexes.
The thing that Instapaper did was different. It allowed you to create an account that did not require authentication at all.
This new thing always requires authentication. It just doesn't use password authentication. You authenticate by verifying that you can use your e-mail account.
PostgreSQL 8.4+ has recursive common table expressions. I don't know if they do everything that CONNECT BY does, but I know that they do everything that I've ever used CONNECT BY for.
I think the OP is referring to the Apache Foundation's process for accepting patches from non-committers. All Apache projects require a copyright grant. The only way (AFAIK) that they allow you to express that you grant the copyright for your changes to the foundation is by checking a box when you upload the patch to their issue tracking system, which happens to be JIRA.
(This assumes you are treating BTC as a currency, which appears to be the OP's intent.)