If there's a $10 bill missing, it will noticed within hours. Where it went will probably be figured out the same day. If someone is stealing, management will usually find out who, how much, and when.
The Bitcoin crowd has a much simpler problem. They're all online, they don't have a staff of people handling money, and they don't have as many special cases as a supermarket does. (Travelers checks, returns, check cashing, etc - Bitcoin exchanges don't have to deal with that.) Most Bitcoin exchanges are doing a few transactions a minute. Bigger supermarkets do more than that. Yet the Bitcoin crowd consistently botches it.
The Bitcoin crowd needs to get some people who have passed Internal Financial Controls 101 at a 2-year business college.[1] This isn't rocket science.
[1] http://www.georgiacenter.uga.edu/courses/governmental-traini...
We can't keep arguing against regulation while allowing this to happen by not self regulating.
To quote somebody who has forgotten more about cryptography and digital currencies than probably the entire population of Bitcoin startup founders put together will ever know, many Bitcoin founders take "offense at the very notion that there might be something to be learned from several millenniums of financial services best practices."[1]
What's really interesting for me is that VCs seem happy to invest in such startups. It's one thing when a small, bootstrapped exchange/wallet provider gets hacked. It'll be a different story when a major, VC-backed one gets done.
1: http://lists.randombit.net/pipermail/cryptography/2014-Febru...
"World's stupidest bitcoin exchange admins, or some of the ballsiest? Inside job?"
That's always the question, isn't it?