People, I fear, are looking at this stuff as some ordinary investment, but as a different kind of money. In which case what happened at Mt. Gox is viewed as a bank getting robbed, rather than the Madoff-esque scheme it looks like.
What is pitiful is that people still consider this more worthy of investment than traditional currencies. I’m not hearing of runs on Mt. Gox, at least not yet.
To be fair, this kind of misplaced trust is why libertarian ideas of government failed long ago. Who’s going to sue Mt. Gox and where? You can’t. So regulators are going to step in, and even the GOP will be copacetic with that.
I want you to think long and hard about the statement you just made. Each of the words you used as a precise definition. I want you to pay particular attention to the words "worthy", "investment" and "currencies".
What is a currency?
What makes a currency worthy?
What does it mean to invest?
What kind of person invests in currency?
The answers are that "currency" is simply a medium of exchange. It can be anything that two parties agree to use as the medium.
The characteristics that make a currency "worthy" can only be defined by the user of the currency. Some different aspects that different users may consider are it's usability in a particular country, it's privacy, it's ease of use, it's portability across borders, it's amount of fees, it's security, it's vulnerability to manipulation, who is able to manipulate it, etc, etc, etc....
To "invest" is to take capital and place it in a position to grow. Do you trade capital to acquire Federal Reserve Notes in the hopes that their value will grow?
The person that hopes to get rich by "investing" in Bitcoin is a fool. The person that uses Bitcoin as a tool to conduct transactions because they value it's use as a means of conducting transactions is not a fool. At least no more than someone who finds value in engaging in political discussions on the internet.