this was an exchange failure not a BTC failure....
Bitcoin would drop by itself? I don't even know what that means. My claims about bitcoin's exchange rate collapsing take into account everything about it, including the awful infrastructure built around it so far (poorly designed exchanges) and the fact that coins are so densely distributed in the hands of so few individuals that at any moment so far a single person or small handful of people wanting fiat can easily wipe out any rise brought on my lots of new users who buy up comparatively few bitcoins.
That isn't something you can seperate from the protocol, because its tied to the nature of its design. If bitcoin is widely adopted it will have gone through many of these catastrophic market events, and yet people will have persisted in adopting it and strengthening the infrastructure around it. That's not a given, though, as eventually this open experiment can burn enough people that wide scale adoption becomes practically impossible.
Anyway, sorry to those who just lost a lot, and a warning to everyone who is still in the black, this event isn't over and a quick recovery is extremely unlikely. This will be worse for bitcoin than 2011.