And this will be cited for years as a case in point for why finanvial institutions should be skeptical of treating crypto currencies as a true piece of payment or currency infrastructure.

At the current level of use, this issue is a side note. At the envisioned level of use by crypto promoters, it woukd be a catastrophic economy-crypaling disaster that would have impacts far beyond a single institution. As infrastructure, this sort of thing is must-work cannot-fail technology on the order of nuclear reactors.

I'm not saying crypto currencies aren't in our future at that scale. I don't know if they are or not. I'm saying we have a much, much longer to go, and the order of a decade, before they have time to mature and then prove that maturity. Until then, they're a speculator side show. Heck, with so much mining capacity in China, they exist in significant part on the suffrance of the Chinese government not feeling too threating by the level of social disruption they might cause. If that threshold is crossed, significant mining capacity an transaction speed that goes with it is a few great-firewall configs away from oblivion. Yeah, miming difficulty will kick in ti alleviate pressure, but only after disaster-level and life-savings-wipeout levels of financial fallout ensue.