Retail banks are not routinely losing customer dollars to online breaches in their own systems; virtually all of them also have infrastructure in place to make any such potential losses immaterial to actual customers. The impression that Bitcoin's actual practical implementation on the web is seriously shady is probably not a product of cognitive bias.

According to http://bitcoinica.blogspot.com/ they didn't lose any customer dollars in this case either. The distinction isn't one of infrastructure, but of policy: the bank defines the theft as being of their money, not your money, and bitcoinica seems to be behaving like a bank in this regard: "The thief stole from us not you. All withdrawal requests will be honored."

Comparing a teenager's site to a bank is being pretty disingenuous here. If you're saying its impossible to code a safe bitcoint repository on par with electric banking then I really need you to back that up with proof because its a pretty insane premise.

I can lose $20 right now and it would be impossible to trace back. Bitcoin really isn't any different than cash, except bitcoin users probably understand the risks a lot more than $random_consumer.

Bitcoin really isn't any different from cash, except that its retail online presence seems to have been uniformly built by people with a teenage-level of engineering experience?

I don't want to bag on the guy who wrote Bitcoinica, except that I wish he had done what I said earlier and built a play-money exchange instead of a "real"†-money system like this.

But I'm happy to berate the people who talk up Bitcoin, the Bitcoin economy, and the ecosystem of Bitcoin services and then, when things fail to the tune of 6-figure losses for customers, try to apologize around it by saying "oh, well, that service was built by a teenager; wait until the serious engineers get around to building Bitcoin services!". It's a frustrating and intellectually dishonest argument to make.

† Heh

I think the chinese dude needed some money and faked a hack. anyone can prove otherwise? Rephrase to make it less offensive if the owners of such a system stole money, how could anyone tell?

I'm actually pretty sure he's not Chinese at all, but actually an alien from a planet in the Gliese 876 system. Can anyone prove otherwise?

I think that's the most offensive thing I'll read all day. I really hope nobody proves otherwise.

He says he's going to reimburse customers out of his pocket; if he actually does that then he couldn't have made money on the hack.