It works well enough for me. I do stuff for people. They pay me in Bitcoin. I lease servers and stuff. And pay Bitcoin. All of that can be as anonymous as I like. So yeah, it works for me.

> Proponents continue to build castles and waste electricity hoping people bite so they can profit.

Sure, some investors do. Me, I wish that they'd find something else to screw up. If it weren't for all the damn miners, we could still mine on our own devices.

> Money is a social tool based on consensus, and today democracy and accountability, that has evolved with human societies however imperfect it may be.

So you say. I don't see any obvious connection between money and democracy or accountability. Money is what people use in trade. Trade is a private matter.

> Why would anyone give up this hard won rule of law and accountability to private individuals operating out of self interest peddling illusions about some imaginary 'freedom'?

So authoritarian jerks can't mess with them?

As someone working in the financial industry, the amount of regulations, internal audits, external audits, reporting requirements, etc. that financial institutions have to comply with is truly staggering.

Sure, they 2008 financial crisis demonstrated that all of this was no silver bullet, but I still consider that system many orders of magnitude more trustworthy than a system that allowed for the shit-show that was MTGOX, and other failed exchanges.

Bitcoin itself is completely auditable in transparent. The system will behave exactly as the code is written.

tl;dr: Neither Ethereum nor Bitcoin have address checksums on the protocol level (remember this HN thread here is about trust) but by now all Bitcoin clients decided to implement it. In this case, the exchange used an Ethereum client which didn't.