re: #205 Wendell Zurkowitz (slave to the waffle light)

That concept is the ideolgical linchpin between libertarians and other supply-side conservatives…to them the Market is an ideology unto itself, not simply a mechanism for balancing supply and demand and directing capital to where it benefits the most.

They also refuse to recognize the fact that the market requires an infrastucture: a physical as well as a regulatory/legislative one, in order to function. And we cannot entrust care and maintenance of that infrastructure to the hands of those who are active participate in the market. That is what elected governments are for.

Full disclosure. I hold some Bitcoin, but not ever at Mt. Gox. It was a disaster waiting to happen, and I could see that three months ago. The reason Mt. Gox is bankrupt is not because of the Bitcoin system, but the sloppy ways Mt. Gox implemented their exchange, including using custom-written code that was not fully vetted. The CEO may have been the author of the code. They also apparently did not keep enough currency in reserve, or those reserves were unavailable somehow, so that they had to restrict withdrawals just to stay afloat — for a while. As soon as Mt Gox announced that withdrawals were restricted and then shut off, it was just a matter of time before it collapsed.

For sure, it’s a wake-up call to the naive dudebros, who believed in the magic of computer code to protect their pet project. Libertarians in general have no sense of how ruthless and greedy some human beings are — very John Galtish, IMO — and those kind of people took advantage of Mt. Gox’s myriad weaknesses.

Now, the Bitcoin community is looking at the other exchanges more closely, to verify those exchanges are being run more responsibly than Mt Gox.