<story><title>Schadenfreude</title><url>http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2014/02/schadenfreude-1.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>corford</author><text>Rather than enjoying some shadenfreude (directed at MtGox and its users, not Bitcoin itself), I&amp;#x27;m bewildered by the users and upset that their stupidity has allowed this predictable fiasco to happen.&lt;p&gt;Leaving the entirety of your BTC savings on an exchange provided and managed wallet is utterly insane at the best of times but to have done so with MtGox was just asking for it.&lt;p&gt;There are countless examples stretching back years that reveal MtGox was nothing more than a badly run website put together by a bunch of amateurs who took an early bet on Bitcoin and got lucky.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s been obvious to anyone who performed even the most basic of research that MtGox would one day blow up spectacularly and there have been vastly better options available for a _long_ time now: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bitstamp.net&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.bitstamp.net&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.kraken.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.kraken.com&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.coinbase.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.coinbase.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s sad people have lost money but MtGox users largely have only themselves to blame. The writing&amp;#x27;s been on the wall since almost forever, better alternatives have been available for a long time now and, regardless of the exchange, they should never, ever have left significant chunks of their BTC net worth on a wallet not under their exclusive control. If you leave all your money on an exchange controlled wallet, you&amp;#x27;ll eventually end up like the poor chumps who bought penny stocks from the Wolf of Wall street: robbed.&lt;p&gt;I just hope the entire BTC ecosystem doesn&amp;#x27;t come crashing down in the fallout.</text></comment>
<story><title>Schadenfreude</title><url>http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2014/02/schadenfreude-1.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>rayiner</author><text>For me the schadenfreude isn&amp;#x27;t about cryotocurrency versus fiat currency. To me the whole Mt. Gox mess is a reminder that there are enough bad actors in society to screw things up, and combine that with ineptitude and you have a recipe for this sort of event. Sure its just one event, but its also a small community, and the event is quite huge proportionally. And its not going to get better. Indeed, as the stakes get higher, it will get worse. Its a corrolary to the idea that DRM will always be broken, no matter how technically sophisticated you make it.&lt;p&gt;There are a lot of idealists in the anarcholibertarian community who talk about &amp;quot;violence&amp;quot; as something that can be taken off the table. And what this shows is that violence is endemic. You can&amp;#x27;t take it off the table, you can just think of different ways to manage it.&lt;p&gt;I would really like to not see Bitcoin regulated or protected, except to the extent it is used to subvert meatspace laws. I just want to see what would happen if, e.g., it wasn&amp;#x27;t considered a crime to &amp;quot;steal&amp;quot; bitcoin. Ideally, it should also be legal to mug someone in real life for his bitcoin, so long as bitcoin is the only thing taken. Because cryptocurrency or not, holding a gun to someone and asking them to hand over the bitcoins they have under their mattress is always an option. Then we could see if the community came up with non-government based solutions to these problems.</text></comment>