> The conventional wisdom was for stocks, which are much higher volume, liquidity, etc, and aren't a newfangled math experiment.

If anything that means the conventional wisdom should apply even more, no? It seems more likely that Ethereum would go all the way to zero than whichever company it was that traded at $.01 during the flash crash (Proctor & Gamble?)

The trades caused by the flashcrash of apple were halted and reversed.

A central institute isn't always bad

Whether reversing those trades was good is not at all clear-cut. Some argue it punished those who were willing to make markets during unstable conditions (because their profitable trades were cancelled and their loss-making hedges weren't), whereas such trading is something we ought to be encouraging.

Agreed. And these are speculative investments, not currencies.