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Comment by christianbryant | Hacker News Reader

Exactly the reason why technology must be open and transparent. Sadly, decision makers that define economic policy and allow organizations to reach this level of misuse (or misconduct) know little to nothing about what these technologies are capable of, or to what extent they can be compromised and manipulated. Kudos to the tech makers and users who do understand for maintaining a watchful eye and not hesitating to report wrong-doing, or the suspicion of wrong-doing. How can we get these guys in office instead of the people that are currently holding back good technology while letting loose the bad?

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I think the problem here is basically misconduct in an unregulated industry. The US and other governments have taken some positive steps towards recognizing BTC and finding ways to bring it into the regulated landscape. I would share your outrage if governments simply outlawed BTC and went after users and entrepreneurs as criminals. However, we're basically all in agreement that BTC is risky and unregulated but legal, and in cases where laws are being enforced against individuals/companies in BTC it's actually to legitimize it as a whole.

Isn't this almost exactly the opposite of the problem here?

What appears to have happened here is something completely unrelated to the technology. The same thing could have happened in any financial exchange.

There were two difference that made it possible here: 1) the investors may have been technical experts but were financially naive and dramatically underpriced the risk, and 2) the market was completely unregulated, so the financially naive investors had no protection from those who weren't so naive.

MtGox customers surely ate not technical experts. Technical experts would hold their own wallet instead of handing it over to some guy in Japan who was publicly known to be unable of running a secure website, let alone a financial exchange.

I think the "unable of running a secure website, let alone a financial exchange" part of your comment goes to the "dramatically underpriced the risk" part of my comment.

Denying their technical expertise is more interesting. I've heard that theory often, and yet there are plenty of people I thought were technically proficient who lost money.

Indeed, I have some (small) amount of money in another Bitcoin exchange - it is convenient.

Perhaps the level of technical expertise of these users is roughly that of an average HN reader: ie, somewhat higher than the general population.

One of the core developers lost over 330 BTC to Mt Gox. Tell me they are not technical experts.

The issue is much deeper than just Mt Gox. It's the entire cloud ecosystem. There would have to be a whole paradigm shift back to P2P and local computing before people stop trusting a Mt Gox. Just because BTC was a radical new P2P currency doesn't mean that all users suddenly realized that they should stop trusting cloud providers. And until there's a distributed BTC exchange, I don't think you can fault the users here.

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