I'm not sure it's 90% incompetence. More like 45% incompetence and 45% actively pushing any sensationalist BS that will sell with no regard for the truth.

Now we have the internet with it's easy access to information it's become obvious just how must rubbish professional journalists spew.

I don't think that's actually true. Even if they did have 51%+ of the mining power they could not alter transactions that had already been made and they could not steal coins. The only thing they could do was to not include transactions in the block chain, effectively stalling them forever.

There were and are better places to change BTC into EUR. Bitcoin.de has bank approval and follows every regulation it can find. Kraken.com also pays EUR and is well respected. Btc-e.com pays in EUR too but it's run by anonymous Russians so be careful there.

The transaction (mining) fee is absolutely tiny. The cost to transfer to and from fiat varies but it can be done fairly cheaply.

Have you seen what western union charge!? It's one hell of a lot.

You know the FDIC insurance isn't free money don't you? That money comes from devaluing the dollars everyone else holds. If your bank fails I bail you out and I don't have any say in the matter.

By that reasoning cars could not exist without horses. It doesn't prove anything.

What failed was the whole idea of trusting random websites. Naive people are going to get ripped off for BitCoin just like they have always been ripped off for dollars. Sad but true.

I thought the definition of a fiat currency was one that was backed by a government and government provided laws. I didn't think a currency backed by the immutable laws of math counted as fiat.

Confidence in BitCoin hasn't gone at all. There is still an enormous amount of positivity about it. New services are being set up daily. Some huge retailers are taking it.

Anyone that was paying attention knew MtGox was going to blow. Anyone with any idea what they are doing doesn't give BitCoin, Gold, Cash, or whatever to random internet strangers to hold.

The market can be irrational for long periods of time. It takes time for consumers to know what they should be demanding.

And that's the basic problem. Fools keep giving their bitcoins to anonymous internet people to hold then act all shocked when those anonymous people disappear.

It's like giving a bundle of bank notes to a random stranger to hold for you. Anyone can see that's not going to end well.

That's not exactly what happened. MtGox claimed to have had massive amount of BitCoins in cold storage until one day they announce they don't. The blockchain shows that a massive number of coins known to be owned by MtGox never got spent. It looks like the idiot Mark Karpeles lost the private keys. Either that or he stole them to spend later.

That and the cop is more likely to use violence.

I already posted so I can't mod, but I just have to say that's a wonderful quote.

On the whole BitCoin fans don't think that. Maybe some naive kids who got a lot of coins by being in the right place at the right time think that. If they do it will cost them dearly. There are perfectly rational people in the BitCoin scene, people who do research and don't throw money at companies that look shady as hell like MtGox did before it blew.

It's been said many times and it deserves to be said many more - MtGox had only been paying out cash with months of delays for about a year before they went insolvent. Their death was widely predicted about a year before it happened. MtGox also has a history of very serious security issues like the time they leaked their entire user database. Hashed passwords, Usernames, Email addresses, the lot.