What protections are there besides the government stepping in if the bank goes bankrupt?

The government stepping in if they 'steal' the money or do shady non-sense too. Also, even without the latter, the quoted argument is still fairly important, nothing is too big to fail.

But no BitCoin bank actually puts that in their terms of service

Based on what you define a "BitCoin bank"... First result on Google searching on this...

Bitcoin Market LLC makes no warranties, expressed or implied, and hereby disclaims and negates all other warranties, including without limitation, implied warranties or conditions of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement of intellectual property or other violation of rights. Further, Bitcoin Market LLC does not warrant or make any representations concerning the accuracy, likely results, or reliability of the use of the materials on its Internet web site or otherwise relating to such materials or on any sites linked to this site.

According to their data, they are well used.

Bitcoinica was a brokerage and currency exchange, not a bank. There is absolutely no reason for banks with Bitcoin.

The comparison was between Bitcoinica and UK bank fraud if you read the previous posts, my comparisons are based on this.

At least for me, the ideal setup is a badass desktop for srs bsns + a cheapo netbook or tablet for when you need the mobility. It will probably cost less than a good laptop.

Money stolen from individuals in the MF Global and Madoff scams have not been returned.

I've never heard of banks under those names.

The difference between traditional banks and (unregulated) BitCoin banks, is that traditional banks are usually backed by the government if they should go belly-up. Outside of that, I don't see much difference.

Not only that, but there are regulations in place to ensure protections.

It's just as illegal to steal BitCoins as it is to steal from a traditional bank account, and the bank has the same duty to reimburse the stolen money.

It doesn't actually, since a terms of service for bitcoins can be legally binding in where it says there is no warranty of services. Banks cannot do that.

I also did not avert an internet meltdown in the 1980s.

To put some perspective on the Bitcoinica incidents, in 2008, the estimated UK bank fraud level was £52.5 million; that is 990.28441 times the amount of this Bitcoin theft

To put some perspective, you're protected by law with the above, not with Bitcoin. Any money stolen from individuals is certainly returned.

There are people on many sides who want Bitcoin to fail, and who will do anything to stop it from growing. The banks hate it, because it will disintermediate and replace their business. The Statists dont like it because it will defund their socialist dreams. The gold bugs loathe it because it is not gold. Keynesian journalists bristle at the fact that the money supply in Bitcoin is limited, and dream of seeing it destroyed.

I doubt the majority of people in the above industries even know what Bitcoin even is. I think you have misconceptions of grandeur, sir.

Bitcoin will continue to grow, and events like this will winnow out the weak services and strengthen the existing ones.

But why would you use Bitcoin instead of Solidcoin?

No, that's not true ... that's not at all what is holding "general AI" back. What's holding "general AI" back is that there is no way at all to implement it. Specialized AI is actually moving forward the only way we know how with actual results. Without further research in specialized AI, we would constantly get no closer to "generalized AI" and I keep using quotes around that because it's such a complete misnomer and holy grail that we aren't going to see it any time soon.

When I studied this stuff there were two hot approaches. One was logic engines and expert systems that could be generalized to the point of encompassing all knowledge. Yeah, good luck with that. How does one codify creativity? The other approach was to model neurons in software and then someday when we have a strong enough computers, they will just emulate brains and become a generalized thinking AI. Again, the further we delved into neurons the more we realized how wrong our basic assumptions were -- let alone the infeasibility to emulating the cascading currents across them.

"General AI" is holding itself back in the same way that "there is no such thing as a free lunch" is holding back our free energy dreams.

We're so far from that, it humors to me to hear questions and any semi-serious question regarding it. It is not the malice of an AI system you should fear, it is the manifestation of the incompetence of the people who developed it that results in an error (like sounding an alarm because a sensor misfired and responding by launching all nuclear weapons since that what you perceive your enemy to have just done) that should be feared!

People are obsessed by the philosophical and financial prospects of an intelligent computer system but nobody's telling me how to implement it -- that's just hand waving so they can get to the interesting stuff. Right now, rule based systems, heuristics, statistics, Bayes' Theorem, Support Vector Machines, etc will get you far further than any system that is just supposed to "learn" any new environment. All successful AI to this point has been built with the entire environment in mind during construction.

Except most apps aren't well behaved, many will hold open wakelocks.

Oh and security- I may want to game my phone to someone and not allow him access to my previously opened banking app.

Oh and phones don't have infinite memory, so out means a delay in the future when you run out.

And it's different from how every other OS in the world works, and differences without good reason are confusing

It was a bad design mistake, probably their biggest one. They need to reverse it badly.

As an Android dev, that's wrong. The app remains running no matter how you leave it. It is only paused, not destroyed