JonasEggeater:
Some of the commenting over on /. is pretty insightful. I like the way that this poster looks at the recent Mt. Gox and Flexcoin issues:
This is not a failure of bitcoin. Suppose you had a stack of companies whose purpose is to store your physical gold and prevent it from being stolen and to serve as an exchange allowing customers to trade gold for currency. Then, it turns out that some of them had inadequate security or were outright crooked and the gold they were storing went missing. This would not be a failure of gold itself. Sure, if sufficient quantities of gold were affected, it would affect the price of gold, but it does not change gold itself. This is the same situation.
‘Bitcoin cannot fail, it can only be failed.’
Like Communism, there’s nothing obviously fundamentally impossible about Bitcoin, but when real-world implementations fail again and again and again, a certain healthy skepticism may be called for.
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