[ceol]

That would be a good analogy if we couldn't transfer money online. But, you know, we can.

The whole point of Bitcoin that's been touted in pretty much every thread, hoisted up by Libertarians like a giant flag, is that it's unregulated. And now, they're all discovering why we regulated in the first place.

[foxhill]

yes, and regulated banks/exchanges have never been the centre of financial disasters.

[saalweachter]

Not that there haven't been failures, but in the US, bank customers -- as opposed to bank shareholders or investors -- are a fairly protected class.

In 2008(?), Lehman investors were fucked, WaMu shareholders were fucked, but as a WaMu customer I was not inconvenienced in the slightest. My money was safe and I was able to freely access it every day during the transition to Chase ownership.

Now, I don't think that it is fair to compare MtGox to a bank. It was really an exchange for investors to speculate on fluctuations in exchange rates, so in the regulated financial industry you'd probably be just as fucked.

I think the take-home message from the failure of MtGox is that your risks don't just come from the volatility of the market you are investing in. You could lose your money through a crash in the market, yes, but you could also lose your money through the incompetence or malfeasance of your investment partners, through having your password stolen and your account hacked, through losing your private keys, ... If you only consider one type of risk, you will understate your total risk, and not hedge against it effectively.

[mindstab]

actually the latest banking disaster was largely due to a decade prior of deregulation, and the economies of other counties who came through it best had retained a lot of their regulation (Canada).