Maybe Mark just didn't want to notice that they were all missing. He could make as much money as possible for as long as possible before anyone caught on.
Some of the early "leaders" in bitcoin have hurt it some. I was at an event yesterday and a Wall Street guy said, "people are afraid...We've got a lot of work to clean up where these early guys screwed up."
Now, if the apparent risk is really illusory, and the string of failures has been caused by incompetence or crooked behavior, then the real risk isn't nearly that bad. Which, you know, is what we all hope. And that's why the whole scene needs to be "rehabilitated" with honest and competent businessmen accumulating a much better track record than these early unregulated and largely incompetent-at-business people have done, before the wall street guys can sell investors on it.
My understanding is that one of the great things about Bitcoin was that it was supposed to take power away from the established financial institutions and the people who currently run our fiat system. But if the current breed of Bitcoin entrepreneurs continue to screw up as they have done so many times in the past and the old Wall Street types have to step in and take control, then perhaps that represents a failure of one of Bitcoin's supposed benefits.
There are good, honest, and technically capable people in the Bitcoin world today. People like Mike Hearn and Gavin Andresen have an in-depth understanding of Bitcoin security and probably won't screw their customers due to incompetence in the same way Mt. Gox and BFL did but unfortunately, they're not really businesspeople.
I proposed the idea of an independent Bitcoin auditing service in
this thread that would audit Bitcoin-based businesses using a team of accountants from the old fiat world and Bitcoin experts like Hearn and Andresen. It's not perfect, but I believe it would go a long way towards encouraging businesses to become more transparent with their operations and adopt better practices with their customers' funds.
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