A few months ago, I wrote on here that US exchanges should be SEC-registered broker/dealers, like every stockbroker in the US. That means exams and audits and regulation by FINRA. It also means insurance. Brokers pay premiums to the Securities Investors Protection Corporation. When a broker goes bust, the SIPC pays customer losses up to $500,000 per customer. They paid off for Madoff customers, for example. (Mr. Madoff is now Prisoner Number #61727-054 at Butner Federal Correctional Institution.)
The "deregulation" fanboys on here hated that idea. They were wrong.
Bullshit. I lost a lot of BTC at gox, so you'd think I'd agree with you, but no, not at all. You see Bitcoin as an investment, just another financial instrument. But that's not what Bitcoin, or more accurately cryptocurrencies, are. Not by a long shot. When the WWW appeared in the mid-90's, were you one of the people who thought it was just a trendy way to buy stuff? Did you believe it was the end of the Internet when the dot com bubble burst?
Also, consider what you're actually saying here. You'd rather trust some slimebag "regulators" than a cryptographic proof system? Exchanges can easily and costlessly publish proof-of-reserve data, which I'm pretty sure is going to happen after this MtGox fiasco.
