Bitcoin exchange hacked via Rails exploit, funds stolen
There seems to be a pattern emerging in all of these 'disruptive' business models, whether it be Bitcoin (banking), AirBnb (hotels), or Uber (cabs). We look around and see these industries burdened by regulation, which tends to create entrenched players and which seem to us to be inefficient. So we create similar peer-to-peer equivalents, only to start rediscovering the reasons for all those regulations in the first place. I would argue that one reason mature industries seem inefficient to us is that it's been so long since we've encountered the problems the regulatory 'inefficiencies' were meant to address, that we've forgotten why our ancestors put them in place. Peer-to-peer is not a new idea, it's how things worked back before we started using government to solve the problems inherent in the peer-to-peer model.