This has everything to do with regulating bit coins and the exchanges. No bank in the US would ever dare run a stock rails site, I would bet they would be rightfully sued. On top of that, funds in a bank are insured to a point so if someone at a bank messes up, the innocent people who lost their money won't lose everything they own. The free market is cruel and so are it's proponents, we've advanced past this "fuck you I've got mine" mentality as a species. If bit coin was regulated like a bank, this wouldn't be a problem. Since anti-regulation people fail to grasp this point, let me add that I do not support every bit of regulation ever passed. There is good regulation and bad regulation. Only intellectually childish people view it as ALL good or ALL bad.
> No bank in the US would ever dare run a stock rails site, I would bet they would be rightfully sued.
Why so? Even banking websites build on frameworks and if you'd have chosen Spring for example, there was a Remote Code Execution vulnerability in 2010. And even if you roll your own framework, you're just as likely to introduce a critical flaw. The Dutch governmental DigiD service runs rails [1]. The critical difference between the BC service and a bank or the government is that a responsible party would have secured their app immediately. The DigiD service was taken down pretty quickly and stayed down until patched. There were multiple workarounds that did not involve major patches and even if you didn't know which of your apps was vulnerable, you could filter the payload at your load-balancers if you had some [2].
[1] http://lwn.net/Articles/532224/
[2] An xml tag with the type "yaml" was required to trigger this. It's a pretty specific payload that is very unlikely to be used in a regular request.
My point is not that all regulation is bad. People decide if a regulation is bad or good. One may think a guns regulation is a good thing, the other may decide that a drugs regulation is a good thing. You can't reach objectivity in most cases. And then regulations have side effects: we always have to look not at just the intentions of those regulations, but also at the incentives they create (and that we cannot always foresee, example: minimum wage law).
