Just because MtGox failed doesn't mean unregulated Bitcoin businesses must fail. Iceland is a pretty poor posterboy for your point: their banks failed even more spectacularly than other countries', their cleanup effort was just much more ruthless. Essentially your argument in favour of regulation is that we now sort-of know how to clean up after it fails spectacularly.

Indeed, other exchanges and other Bitcoin businesses don't appear to suffer from the gross incompetence that brought down MtGox.

> Another thing to keep in mind, the people who got the bailouts are a subset of the people who claim unfettered capitalism will cure all ills.

Is that so? In that case they are paying the same kind of lip service to that point as a kleptocratic dictator on his private jet is to socialism.

>Iceland did pretty well for itself in the aftermath, even having let the bad behavior slip past them. And Canada apparently never let the bad behavior begin in the first place.

Iceland did it by stiffing creditors. That's a short-run gain, long-term pain solution.

With regards to Canada, there are specific laws that have inhibited a housing crisis, but we don't know if we have avoided anything yet. Our housing in major centres is as frothy as the peaks of almost anywhere else in the world who suffered a bust. It's too early to say.