> Having confirmed that it was complete amateur hour over at MtGox, how can a critical thinking person make the huge leap that only bureaucratically controlled

> Having confirmed that it was complete amateur hour over at MtGox, how can a critical thinking person make the huge leap that only bureaucratically controlled government currencies are viable. Can’t speak for the author (who’s actively commenting here) but I believe the idea (common in Transaction Cost economy) is that whether Mt.Gox were amateur was hard to determine without knowing how to operate for yourself the kind of service that they provided; not necessarily at their scale, but well enough to go without them. This means that most folks who were interested in their service were presumably not able to sort them from the other: lots of assumption there, but imagine shill-ridden forums, cross-accusation of cluelessness, the FBI presumably involved, them being in Japan… This is not a new problem, far from it: I would recommend Avner Greif’s ‘Magrihbi traders’ and the reappraising discussions by its author. A casual reader could leap the century of nepotism-based boating, and the local fairs in Europe to conclude that the invention of currency, concomitant with the Nation-State, were both a way to empower trade. A less casual reader (like me) would love to send Greif, (the now late) Coase & Oliver E. Williamson to Japan and on-line to investigate what went wrong. Once you have a State, why an inflating bureaucracy is also a classic result of transaction cost theory and an issue in organisational incentive — but I don't think that part is mysterious to you.