[danielweber]

The money lost to someone buying some gas is minimal.

Transactions are completely reversible until someone involves physical goods, including cash. The system can deal with tiny levels of fraud. With Bitcoin, someone can do a complete transfer of my life savings in an instant, and then what?

[lftl]

If a hacker manages to get into your online bank account and transfer everything out, you're still out of luck unless the bank decides to cover it for you. As far as I know, unless the bank catches it before a transfer is made (which they very well might with fraud detection), they don't necessarily have any means to reverse the transaction after it hits the hackers account. I don't really have any deep experience with that side of banking so feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but in my limited experience I've seen that once money leaves your account it's only reversible in the sense that the bank may decide to cover the loss for you. There might be some tiny window to reverse things, but I don't think it's a terribly large one.

[danielweber]

For personal banking in America, there are almost assuredly laws that say it's the bank's responsibility. (Note that the rules are different for businesses.)

I'm still trying to find the reference I mentioned yesterday, the gist of which was that personal banking theft is limited by the number of cash mules who can be recruited. Krebs[1] has many articles about money mules that I hope will lead me to it.

EDIT I found it! [2] "Federal Reserve Regulation E guarantees that US consumers are made whole when their bank passwords are stolen."

[1] http://krebsonsecurity.com/2010/01/top-10-ways-to-get-fired-...

[2] Is Everything We Know About Password-Stealing Wrong? http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=1618...