The collapse of Mt.Gox this week has sent shockwaves through the early-adopting tech community. Hundreds of millions of dollars worth of bitcoins have been lost, and account holders are justifiably angry about their missing balances. It is easy to heap blame on Mt.Gox’s founders and call this a once-in-a-lifetime calamity, but the context behind the company’s demise is far more pernicious and occurs far more frequently than it should in the tech community.
Users today take incredible risks when starting to use a product, risks that they don’t appreciate when they click on a trial button or download an app. System reliability is often assumed when it is unwarranted, and data integrity and loss prevention is rarely guaranteed. Worse, we make little mention of the beta status of new services, misleading users to believe that the product they are using is far less risky than it appears in the glossy product pages. In no other industry would companies be able to get away with this, and if we don’t change things fast, our exceptional absence of regulation may become part of the past.
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