code security-wise and push it live than it is to create code that is actually properly implemented for a banking environment to handle both the large amounts of money and the quite serious number of attacks that will take place once the amount of money available is established.
In a competitive environment, the folks who take short cuts will save money in the short term, and thus will be more likely to pick up users than a more expensive equivalent that actually did the security correctly.
And in the long term they will be out of business.
Or not. If it were up to most regulators, definitely not.
Mtgox was never in a highly competitive environment. If it were it wouldn't have been on top so steadily with so little improvements in service rendered.
The service rendered was trade volume. It seemed to do that quite well.
Although that's not the whole picture. In this case, a different problem is that people are using a *centralized* exchange as a bank to keep their supposedly *decentralized* e-money.
This is offtopic to be honest. Whoever needed a money that was totally centralized, and why does he/she think Bitcoin is it? It's much much much more decentralized than any other currency. The fact that it's not useless now is what sets it apart from things like the LibertyDollar, so I'd say it's working just fine. Can't stand this sort of underinformed bullshitting.
I'd argue that centralized systems provide, on averge, a larger anonymity set and privacy in the majority of cases than decentralized ones. In particular exchanges that everyone believes are 'incompetent' are a wonderful place to get a lot of cheap plausible deniability by making everyone else that uses it pay for it when the house of cards falls down. -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Troy Benjegerdes 'da hozer' hozer@hozed.org 7 elements earth::water::air::fire::mind::spirit::soul grid.coop Never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel, nor try buy a hacker who makes money by the megahash