Incompetent exchange goes out of business. Said exchange try to compensate their customers. Customers learn better to scrutinize other exchanges for their backup policies and how they run their business.
Of course, this is the free market. Failure to be competent, either as an investor, user, or exchange, result in monetary loss.
To others, this is horrible. To me, this is the way I like it.
I wish for the accurate consequence of my decisions, not a jacked up distorted picture of reality. This prevent crisis from becoming a minor blip in the bitcoin economy into something that fundamental destroy the bitcoin economy.
Adding regulators who have a hold on the whole Bitcoin economy with no alternative for said regulators, with no incentives to for regulators to regulate the market right is a recipe for disaster. You want regulation and regulators? Show me the incentives for them to make things right. Show me why they will not fall prey to regulatory capture. Give me precise details of how this is all suppose to work and what the rules are.
This one was just (apparently) incompetence. Wait until the real crooks get going.
Bitcoin has unique properties in terms of exchanging wealth. If you don't actually need those properties though you probably shouldn't be using bitcoin for anything other than playing with it.
Otherwise you'd accept any level of inefficiency as the market working, at which point it's just an ideological label.
Although it's not clear that regulation of bitcoin is even possible, we can still consider losses due to its absence.
Our economy, despite recent "deregulation" is the most regulated, especially when you count criminal and civil law as well, in the world. There are countless laws against selling known-bad products (lemon cars, toxic mortgages, etc) and we could have almost everyone involved in the recent collapse behind bars if we tried.
We pay through the nose for the regulation, especially in the collateral damage from false positives and economic friction, and it's totally worthless at catching the biggest criminals (in terms of dollars stolen) in world history.
If I want regulation I can use a regulated exchange. Or rather, if I felt like using beta-software I'd be doing it and would be thankful to be allowed even if I had just lost my test fund. Forced regulation would remove the choice.
And ultimately regulation implies that rules stop the bad guys and we know that's true. Thanks, but I'll wait until an open-source and audit-able exchange comes along, and then I'll listen to the experts I respect.