But with bitcoin it will always be easy for people paying attention to take physical possession of their own coins in their own wallets. The only way to stop this is to make it illegal entirely, which exposes the scam. This is why I am betting on bitcoin more than gold this time around.
It's easy for people who are paying attention.
Yet, in spite of this, how many people who should have known better left life-changing amounts of Bitcoins sitting in the care and custody of Mark Karpeles because they were to lazy to set up a secure wallet on their own computers?
How many people will be tricked into the promise of interest-bearing Bitcoin bank accounts, pegged-to-gold or "easy" web wallets where they "don't have to worry" about their own security or backups.
How many Bitcoins are credited to the the accounts of Coinbase users vs the number that they actually hold?
In the long term, the manipulators lose. It's a question of how much damage they cause and how many innocent people get robbed between now and the inevitable.
Comparatively what I lost on Gox and Vircurex (22BTC) is peanuts to some of the people who lost hundreds if not thousands of bitcoin on those sites and others like it. Hopefully the Gox incident was enough to live forever in peoples minds and prevent it from ever happening again.