Ah, humans. Why does it always have to be about tribes? Just as the maligned r/bitcoin subreddit - and much of the Bitcoin 'community' in general - coalesced around the libertarian banner, the discussion here appears to be more about the fuzzies of reaffirming your membership in the 'not them' tribe than a desire to learn something new.

The thing is - Bitcoin is not libertarian (or of any other political persuasion). It speaks nothing of regulation. It's just an idea with a very rough, imperfect early implementation. To entertain it long enough to get anywhere near to grokking it requires a non-trivial commitment and I believe what is happening here is that we take shortcuts in deciding whether this commitment is worthwhile by following our tribe. It's a great optimization most of the times (you have aligned yourself with these people because of a significant overlap in your world views) but in case of something as completely out there as Bitcoin, this optimization will inevitably lead to a suboptimal outcome. As it happens, some of Bitcoin's properties look a lot like what libertarians value which is likely why their tribe aligned themselves as it did and their optimization fails the other way - they embrace an idea that may well be diametrically opposed to their interests once it fully plays out.

What is the point in slinging insults at the other tribe (those blind idiots in their silly echo chamber) when they're not even around to debate you? The schadenfreude part of it irks me in particular because it's just such a fucking ugly trait.

As a definite non-libertarian, what I see in Bitcoin is another piece of the puzzle in mankind's potential transition from organizing in hierarchies to peer to peer. We may be seeing the first glimpse of a dawn of new society that will perhaps view ours the way we view the medieval feudal system. And the thing is - the genie is out of the bottle. The idea is now unleashed and you can ignore it all you want - it won't unthink itself. The most productive thing to do now is to help steer it in the direction that will cause the least harm and produce the most good.

As for the OPs question - there's no crisis in Bitcoin. The protocol continues to exceed my expectations both on the technical side and from a game theory point of view.

It's tragic that so many people lost more money than they could afford and it's tragic that Mark Karpeles has put himself in a position he was in no way competent for and I can't help but empathize with him as his life now appears to be unraveling. The reason why many people are not 'flinching' is because so many of us saw this coming for a long time - Mark has repeatedly demonstrated that he is completely out of his depth as his exchange was hacked and DDOSed repeatedly. MtGox was seen as a massive liability just waiting to explode and people have been warned repeatedly. One reason those warnings were not heeded is the sheer power of the collective greed - the same greed that Bitcoin is using as a fuel right now to bootstrap itself into existence.