Mining prevents double spends, that's all it does.

It doesn't prevent your bitcoins being stolen or make you whole afterwards, it's not analogous to a security guard standing outside a vault, or the government guaranteeing your deposits.

I'm mildly optimistic about about crypto currencies in the long term (10 years or more), but energy usage is the weak point of bitcoin, I wrote about this here http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/195k4o/the_case_for...

That is the level of security in the bitcoin network. It might be a design flaw to assume we can act like responsible adults, I agree. But if you're looking for something that makes end-runs completely impossible, I'm afraid you are asking to much and you won't find it in anything that exists.

I just think the term is misleading, especially to people who don't know much about bitcoin.

Could you expand on this? I'm not sure I understand it. Thanks.

There are plenty of organizations that, if they wished to mess with bitcoin, could easily afford more computing power than the bitcoin network (yes, even though that is "bigger than any supercomputer".)

Included in these organizations are ones (such as the US government) that have been accused by some of bitcoins proponents of being actively attacking bitcoin.

So why should we consider confirmed transactions to be secure?

(If you don't care about sybils, you can use Ripple which requires no mining.)