Third, the organizations in Bitcoin's ecology are very flaky. Mt. Gox is two guys in Tokyo who are in way over their heads. We don't know much about Tradehill, which is somewhere in Chile. Neither of these "exchanges" has a published business address, a Dun and Bradstreet rating, published audits, or regulation as a bank or money transfer firm. Yet they're acting as depository institutions for sizable funds belonging to others.
I've seen several posts that echo this sentiment. What the authors of such threads fail to recognize is that fringe ideas are not embraced by the mainstream. If we all waited for Dun and Bradstreet, Goldman Sachs, etc. to enter the fray, BC would not be a new, radical idea. It would be part of the establishment. Oh course it's going to start off with two guys in the basement on a shoestring budget. How do you think Kinko's got started? Was Linux backed by Microsoft?
I imagine that centuries ago people were saying stuff like "You put your money in a Swiss bank? Are you crazy? Those guys are flakes without any established reputation or credentials."
Is there risk with BC's? Yes! Is there risk with any new, unproven idea? Yes! IMO, the author of this thread misses the whole point of BC's.
Matt