We had a major hack of Mt. Gox., closing of ALL Bitcoin exchanges for days (Mt. Gox, Tradehill, Virwox), a demonstration of the apparent instability of Bitcoins (watching their value go from 17.50 to .01 in minutes), etc.
The fact that you say "a demonstration of the apparent instability of Bitcoins" tells me that you have absolutely no knowledge of what actually transpired.
The artificial collapse of a trading market has no impact on the stability of the medium. It was artificial. The only thing it proves is that the Exchanges, going forward, will have to safeguard against this exact issue. It could just as easily been due to a human error, typing and offer price when their cat stepped on the return key at 2, instead of 20. The "real world" exchanges have these types of "volatility airbrakes". You don't think if someone sold 1 million shares of Apple for $0.05 each that the NYSE would just allow that transaction and move on? Absolutely not, they'd freeze trading of AAPL until they could figure out what went wrong.
The only failure is that Mt. Gox didn't have those type of controls present. That's it. Everyone thinks the market is going to crash when it opens this evening. It won't. It'll dip as panicked people sell off briefly, but guess what will happen, those of us that still believe will get a deal on BTC. I for one will have my buy order sitting there at $10 waiting. I kicked myself for not having bought two weeks ago when it dipped to $10, now I'll have my chance again.
All you're doing is explaining WHY Bitcoins are so unstable. The main exchange (let's face it, Mt. Gox is connected to Bitcoin for most people, even more so than "Bitcoin.org") had no controls in place, and ALLOWED the value of BTC to crash all the way down to .01 -- and the only solution was to REVERSE MANY TRADES which many people don't like. They also have to close the exchange for a couple days.
(BTW, I wasn't even there when the price crashed. I didn't buy any cheap BTC, so I'm not personally invested in them NOT reversing trades. But I can understand, objectively, how reversing a bunch of trades -- trying to cop a "do over" -- tends to make the whole thing look "mickey-mouse" to outsiders...)
When was the last time the DOW dropped to single digits? Could you imagine the DOW Jones Industrial Average dropping from the current 12,000 all the way to less than 1 -- in an hour or two? You'd never see it.
I'm not saying Bitcoins are flawed -- I'm saying that to many people, their "objective value" just took a big hit, since people WATCHED THEM DROP TO A PENNY WITHIN MINUTES. That's not a confidence-building exercise.
And while it's true that Mt. Gox is "just one business in the Bitcoin economy", it's also true that they're the MAIN exchange as far as activity, and it's a big deal when they go down or have problems. They might as well BE bitcoin for the majority of users.