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I'd say anyone who bought a house at the peak of the housing market also lost a significant fraction of their net worth. Should we say those are the ones who r
by PakG1 13y ago
I'd say anyone who bought a house at the peak of the housing market also lost a significant fraction of their net worth. Should we say those are the ones who really should have taken the time to know better? Consider just how many people lost a significant fraction of their wealth and now have underwater mortgages. Do you see where I'm going here? Caveat emptor really does only go so far. That's why at the end of the day, there's supposed to be regulation, to ensure a safe place as possible for people to conduct their economic activity, realizing that risk is still unavoidable. There's acceptable risk, and then there's, oh-no-those-bankers-were-pulling-some-nasty-tricks-and-the-public-suffers risks.
- bunderbunder 13y ago>Consider just how many people lost a significant fraction of their wealth and now have underwater mortgages. Exactly. We really do need to design systems to be used by the human beings we actually are, not the super-humans we like to think we are.
- locopati 13y agoWhile the expectation of accountability holds for banking and mortgages (and in that case was more or less ignored and hardly punished for it), does it hold for MtGox and Bitcoin, where the foundation is built on the lack of regulation?
- PakG1 13y agoIf we want to look at it that way, perhaps we can ask what the Bitcoin Foundation was doing to make sure their members were more capable then? The fact is that if you want Bitcoin to go mainstream, someone somewhere has to be able to say that a service provider is reliable because normal laypeople can't be expected to make that judgment call wisely.