My god, it's full of stars... Best read of my young week. Thanks. I like it when comp sci professors affirm my suspicions and do so in a scathingly snarky way.
Again, objectively, Bitcoin exchanges have had a crisis every six months, because they use terrible databases whose code quality matches that of a masters project. I went to the Cornell dairy barn, I drank the fizzy milk drinks that the agriculture students designed for their masters projects. The code being peddled under the first-generation NoSQL rubric is analogous in its construction and quality.
If I were to encounter my bank's CEO on IRC, I would not think "how cool and edgy, lemme get a screen cap, LOL," I'd put my money in a mattress and short the bank's stock.
Overall, Bitcoin has been an ongoing massive online course on economics and distributed systems for the libertarian masses. It's ironic that Mt. Gox turned into a chapter on fractional reserve banking.
The Bitcoin demographic is 98% male, between the ages of 20-30. I base this on official online polls, confirmed by pictures of the Bitcoin Christmas party at Bitcoin HQ in NYC, which somehow managed to look more depressing than my high-school dances. This demographic uses their laptops for viewing highly questionable content and their phones for installing flapping bird software from Jimmy Bob's Software Inc. These are the same people who have started but not yet finished reading The Fountainhead, the same people who grant permissions to make phone calls, activate cameras and send SMSs to phone apps whose sole function is to act as a flashlight. Running a wallet is the last thing they should be trusted with.
What Nigerian scams are to your grandfather, Bitcoin exchanges are to the 20-30 semi-tech-savvy libertarian demographic.