Wow. This is an embarrassing demonstration of the authors ignorance of the current state of the cryptocurrency market.
It is appalling that former CEO Mark Karpeles may benefit from the exchange collapse he caused through either incompetence or thievery. But it's hardly different from the rewards paid out to those who caused the US economic melt down in 2008.
> The other reason not to trade bitcoin is that, as far as I can tell, the fate of any bitcoin exchange/wallet/bank/custodian is to be hacked. That is just how bitcoin works: You buy bitcoins on an exchange, and you store them at the exchange because it's a pain to keep your private key yourself, and then the exchange gets hacked and your bitcoins get stolen. ("There have been at least three dozen heists of cryptocurrency exchanges since 2011," Reuters noted[2] last week.)
In general, his Money Stuff commentary tends to have a sort of sarcastic reductionist vibe to it. Whether the ignorance is true or feigned for effect really depends on the reader's perspective, I guess.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-10-03/bitcoin-t...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/bitcoin-...
Here's a talk that discusses the financial situation at MtGox and the raging dumpster fire that its security system was when Mark Karpeles bought it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l70iRcSxqzo
It's hard to say if the poor security was due to a staggering level of inexperience and thoughtlessness, or if the previous owners had left it open so they could pilfer money as easily as possible before the whole house of cards collapsed. It's hard to imagine a financial services administrator leaving an unsecured Windows file share open to the Internet with all of the private keys on it, but somehow this was considered to be not a problem at MtGox.