Bitcoin's cryptographic trust model seems to place too much trust in cryptography and too little acceptance of reality.  Network and user security is a virtual wild west and likely forever will be.  The moment a device is connected to a network, it is vulnerable to intrusion.  That in itself is where the breakdown in trust starts.  Black and white hat hackers have been playing leapfrog for state-of-the-art since the beginning. As we continue to pour more of our lives into the ether this will go on.

The problem we keep seeing may not be with the protocol itself, but the implementations.  Bad code interfacing with the protocol (ie. at an exchange), lax security update procedures, known OS holes, theft/'insolvency'... these all are real world barriers to the widespread acceptance of bitcoin.

A major drawback to the decentralized nature of bitcoin is that some very critical tasks (ie. security) are largely left up to the end user.  Today this includes trolling these boards to stay on top of security issues, which exchanges/services/merchants are legit/solvent, keeping wallets up to date, etc.  Mainstream Anytown, Anywhere doesn't have time for this.  It's just money, we're used to taking these things for granted (and paying for it).

Will bitcoin ever get to the point where I can trust my grandma with her pension?

Announcing CryptoAPI.net a simple and fast API aggregator for altcoins.  We track select altcoin markets and maintain up-to-the-minute average exchange rates available via our own API.

Supported currencies:
DRK - drk.cryptoapi.net
GRC - grc.cryptoapi.net
LTC - ltc.cryptoapi.net
SMC - smc.cryptoapi.net
UNO - uno.cryptoapi.net

Next up... charting and historical search.

http://cryptoapi.net/

How should an exchange legitimately and fairly respond after a hacking incident resulting in theft of funds or unauthorized trades?

All we seem to see are examples of what not to do.  I am really interested in a discussion of how things should be done.  There should be an industry standard expected response.  It should be as simple as halt trading and transfers, investigate, roll back to before, restore and resume.  Watching bitcoin and other cryptos through several major incidents this last year and this is definitely not the case.

Can we compare crypto exchanges to forex and stock exchanges or should we expect them to respond differently?

What can we do to insulate crypto exchanges from each other to prevent one from tanking any specific crypto-currency on the broad market?