[sillysaurus3]

And since bitcoin is mostly unregulated, we get to deal with fun things like exchanges manipulating the market in order to inflate the price of bitcoin, as Mt. Gox did. Worse, every honest exchange will be manipulated too, because a fluctuation at one exchange will always affect every other. The net effect is that we have transferred power from regulated markets whose regulation is enforced by governments to private businesses that manipulate the market.

I don't know how the stock market has dealt with these issues. What if someone were to set up a stock exchange in a country without laws that prohibit market manipulation? Would manipulation at that exchange affect every other exchange, as a bitcoin exchange would? How would traders in America or Europe detect and respond to that manipulation? Surely this is a problem that has already been addressed for the stock market, so maybe bitcoin could use the same solution. (That seems difficult without regulation, but maybe whatever solution the stock market uses could work for bitcoin too.)