Bitstamp reports $5 million hack, suspends operations.

[randomness]

Izabella Kaminska continues her coverage of Bitcoinmania in the Financial Times with a piece on Monday's troubles at Bitstamp, one of the remaining Bitcoin exchanges.

She makes this observation: "[H]ow nuts are the markets when the most objective and reasonable analysis of a new asset class pumped by the great and the good in the tech world comes by way of a parody sub-Reddit entitled Buttcoin?"

(http://www.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/ has a slogan: "Powered by gold. Comedy gold.")

One of the best bits of snark today:

What I find most interesting about bitcoin is how libertarians are relearning hundreds of years of economics the hard way.

to which Ms. Kaminska replies:

It's like instead of going to university to learn about finance from books, they've decided to learn all about it by running their own fantasy finance market. You know, the same way we teach politics to some young folk by having them operate a mini United Nations and what not.

Comments

[achinhibitor.livejournal.com]

(Second try -- I seem to have buggered my last comment, and it was marked as anonymous.)

[The Enron scandal] will remind everyone -- some conservatives, painfully -- that a mature capitalist economy is a government project. A properly functioning free-market system does not spring spontaneously from society's soil as dandelions spring from suburban lawns. Rather, it is a complex creation of laws and mores that guarantee, among much else, transparency, meaning a sufficient stream -- torrent, really -- of reliable information about the condition and conduct of corporations. -- George F. Will

What makes the dollar so useful for implementing markets is that it's carefully regulated by a board of technocrats appointed by the government of a huge democratic country.