the story you are commenting on is a good example

it should not be this easy to lose sixteen million dollars

Yes. If a similar scale thing were to happen in the U.S. banking system, 1% would be 160 billion dollars, not 16.

I'm amazed that otherwise intelligence people really believe this is a better system than fiat currencies + banks.

Microtransactions.

*intelligent

I feel like we shouldn't be expressed in dollars, but in percentage of total funds. In this case 16 million is about 1% of the total. This would be a $16 billion case if the US banking system was the target and used this technology.

That... doesn't make a difference in my mind. Losing 1% of people's money is _very_ unacceptable and worth being laughed at for.

Financial institutions are accurate to tiny tiny fractions of percentage points. Not "eh we got 99% of it right".

Especially when the odds are that it will happen again soon.

You should ask yourself what the Bitcoin developers are doing while Ether takes their market share. The answer is the exact same thing, at https://elementsproject.org

Now why hasn't there been as much publicity about this? Is it because Vitalik Buterin is a wunderkind genius who simply beat them to market? Nope, the Bitcoiners are simply being more responsible and making sure they get the formula right before rushing to market.

You sound very biased on this.

I am very biased because I know the people at Blockstream have been thinking about this problem longer than the developers of Ethereum.

Please see this article to get an idea of the personalities involved:

http://www.newsbtc.com/2016/08/17/gregory-maxwell-vitalik-bu...

Beyond the one we're already discussing?