Create a bogus FB account and check it out. I have a few, each for various things I'm checking out.

In other news, scientists have determined that the smaller-sized and shorter-lived (faster generations) organism known as the "chicken" has successfully adapted and thereby avoided excinction, by changing its flavor to something resembling elephants.

in the real world, figuring out whom to trust and whom not to, is something everyone already does.

Were that true, Mt Gox wouldn't have been in business.

Mt Gox is a great example! Ok, so I mis-spoke when I said everybody already does it. I meant everybody already knows they should, and a majority of people do it. Most people wouldn't do business with Mt Gox, and the few who did, either got an "oops" reminder or had to shrug and admit they had been taking great risks.

You've got to remember that especially over the last year, a shitload of people involved in Bitcoin (and especially the people you hear about in the media) had been thinking of Bitcoin as a speculative investment, not as a type of money. They're the same kind of get-rich-quick-without-doing-anything people that were "day trading" a decade ago. They either knew they taking risks when they worked with companies like Mt Gox, or they were fools.

I'm amazed that people think Mt Gox somehow shows a failure in Bitcoin (or as some weird exception to all the same money-related common sense that people normally expect to see in other people and themselves). You've got this thing in its total infancy, going through its recent speculation bubble, and this is as bad as it gets?!

The especially funny thing about Mt Gox is that if they had been a dollars-euros exchange and the same thing had happened (where they disappeared with a bunch of peoples' dollars and euros) I wonder which currency people would blame it on. Was it dollar's fault, or was it euro's fault? (I just know that people who'd say "It was neither a dollar or euro problem; fools will be fools and sometimes they get burned," would be called anarchists or libertards.)

Join any of the closed but visible anti-vax groups on Facebook. These parties go on to this day.

That may seem like a victory but it's really just scratching the surface. Once you have cloned a mammoth what then? To establish a viable population you need genetic diversity, a minimum founder population of 50-100 individuals that should preferably be as distantly related as possible. The up side of a project like this is that if we can solve the problem do cloning a mammoth it we can start harvesting the DNA of many individuals of species like tigers and rhinos that are about to be become extinct thanks hedonistic nouveau rich assholes with more money than sense who keep poachers and exotic pet traders in business. Then, at a later date when Gene Roddenberry's vision has come true and mankind has grown up (not holding my breath) we will be able to recreate viable populations.

Mammoths survived until at least 2500 years ago on Wrangel island where that particular population was probably wiped out by modern humans so at least the habitat question is a non issue.

... meanwhile on anti-vax FB pages that I have gotten into, they are having measles-parties, mumps-parties, and the like. Intentionally exposing their kids to disease.

It's not negative, the older generation is just more jaded and has seen too many things like this turn into a fad to risk any significant amount of tangible worth on it. There is also the risk of association given the close links between BC and the digital underworld to consider, particularly when dealing with laypersons (many of whom might be in senior management); "You use Bit Coin? Isn't that used to buy drugs and stuff?" It's not some toy like a new programming language, Seti@Home, or an Arduino that you can hack around with and the only real risk is a bit of time and CPU cycles; you've got to put actual money on the line, and quite a bit of it if you want to mine productively. Those "flaws and nitpicks" that you mention are resulting in far too much of that money getting ganked, although admittedly, that's often the fault of the original owner failing to do their homework and making a silly mistake like trusting their BC to a third party that isn't deserving of that trust.

In my view, crypto currencies are still at v1.0, and we all should know the rule about ".0" releases, let alone "1.0" releases. As such, I find that it's an interesting notion but almost certainly doomed to be replaced by something new and improved once all the teething troubles and peripheral issues that we are currently seeing get addressed. I'm not really expecting the tech masses (including the jaded grey beards) to really embrace it until we start seeing the next generation of currencies and have some kind of framework in place to prevent most of those "flaws and nitpicks" without having to RTFM. Any possible mainstream public acceptance is probably only going to come once there are far more legitimate uses than illegitimate ones and it's generally seen as a safe and convenient thing to do, even for a complete n00b that's likely to click on a link to a file called "rootkit.exe", cancel the AV warnings and run it anyway.

Citizens shouldn't need to check the status of each company they do business with. That would be too much work for individual in the real world to ever do it.

If you're going to make that argument, then please don't bring the real world into it, because in the real world, figuring out whom to trust and whom not to, is something everyone already does.

I'm not really saying we shouldn't have a common set of protections; nobody is going to say "I'm pro-fraud." But we really do disagree on how low the bar can be, what risks (and expenses to insure against risks) are acceptable, and so on. And in the real world, everything is about risks, not absolute protections. One company uses a VISA merchant account, another just has a paypal account. Who are you to say one of them is wrong to accept Paypal's offer (or that both are wrong, since the company should just be waiting for checks (or cash) in the mail)?

People don't even know what the common set of rules is. I just assumed it was illegal for credit card companies to sell to third parties, information about what products I buy, but no. Go next door in one direction, and you'll find someone who is astonished that I could be so naive. Go next door from there, and you'll find someone else who still doesn't know, and is equally astonished for for the opposite reason.

Every time you see a piece of paper with a shitload of fine print, you are looking at direct evidence that nobody is satisfied that the lines are in the right places, and everyone is doing something about it, by sending out that fine print or by continuing to do business with the people who sent it to them.

You can build regulated structures out of unregulated primitives.

Experience says you can't.

You've had some unique experiences, then. Dollars themselves used to built out of less-regulated gold. Western Union, credit cards, and other more complicated (and more "rulesey") things were built out of dollars. Paypal, complete with its frustrating freezes (suddenly labeled "over-regulation" or "private regulation" by those burned), was built on credit cards and bank accounts. Your experience doesn't include any of this? (Or to call up my previous analogy, CPython and its wonderful garbage collection, is built atop C.)

And Bitcoin certainly isn't regulated.

Exactly. It's not, and it probably won't ever be (unless governments persuade people to adopt some blockchain policy changes). Yet, in the news today, Singapore says it intends to regulate Bitcoin exchanges within their jurisdiction. That's what I mean about building regulated things upon unregulated primatives. You might not understand Bitcoin, but if a government were to tell you that a particular Bitcoin escrow had that government's full faith and backing, then you might be willing to use that escrow, even if the funds were stored as Bitcoin. At the same time, there would be people out there, possibly having fun with Bitcoin and doing business with each other using that currency, without ever using that exchange and getting themselves stuck in the regulations.

Just like what happens with dollars.