for anyone who sees bitcoin as a 'wild west' environment, this sort of thing is obvious and just moves the bitcoin economy forward. problems found now are fixed, and won't be as big of a deal later.

"just moves the bitcoin economy forward"

Contrary to popular(?) opinion, there is such a thing as bad publicity. At least when you're selling a get rich quick scheme.

But this isn't a beta test. People treat Bitcoin as if it's ready for primetime and ready to replace traditional currency.

Yes, there's never limits on cash withdrawl in the glorious banking system.

[0] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-25861717

If one of the main bullet points of your currency replacement is that "it's frictionless unlike regular money", and you ever find yourself pointing the finger at regular money and saying "it has frictions too" you already lost the argument.

People should know better. I made a nice profit last year with bitcoins which could have been a lot more if I had sold them later, but I always saw that as an experiment. It was basically fuck you money that I could affort to lose. I truly believe that cryptocurrency will have a lasting impact in the future, but right now it's just much a gamble as playing roulette. In its current state, believing bitcoin is as stable as traditional currency is very, very naive.

I had a large reply written out for you, but then I realized it was just a long-winded way of writing "Risk Reward"

Yes, of course it is Risk/Reward. That's why people get into new things. Ocean travel wasn't ready for primetime, but if you came back with a ship full of gold and spices...

If the worst problem in the fiat banking cartel industry was occasionally buggy client software, we would all be floating on a cloud of happiness and rainbows.

That's weird, even in 2009 my market investments didn't randomly end up with an account balance of 0.00.

Seems that fiat is doing much better than "occasionally buggy". They even usually catch the bank robbers, let me know when Team Bitcoin tracks down the SR2 thief!

Either SR2 was hacked or someone ran off with the funds. Whatever the case may be, I do not see how the friction (or lack thereof) of Bitcoin has anything to do with this.

I'm still waiting to hear how they plan to scale Bitcoin to 50,000 transactions per second. To cover a part of the current financial system alone (but only in the U.S., not the rest of the world). 50,000 is a looong way from 7.