People who enter bitcoin come from a nanny-state socialist market environment where they expect regulatory bodies to protect them from poorly performing institutions. Why they have this expectation is beyond me, since people are being scammed left and right, even with the regulatory bodies. But nonetheless, people come to bitcoin with the expectation that if something is popular and in use, it must perform well.
So the first and biggest exchange they hear about is MtGOX. And they sign up. A month later, they learn their lesson, but still, a lot of them stay with gox. There are many excuses "it has liquidity" "gox has treated me well" etc. etc. etc. But in order for people to finally vote with their wallets, they need to slowly wake up to the idea that no one is going to protect them - they need to do their research before selecting an exchange.
It takes 2 seconds on the Economics or Speculation subforum - or heck, ANYWHERE on bitcointalk.org to figure out that MtGOX lags anytime there is high volume, and has been responsible for many a flash crash. But many thousands of people simply didn't take the time to look that up or didn't understand the negative feedback for what it was worth.
+1
This just shows the weakness of the BTC market- many speculators here talk like crazy about fundamentals in BTC, but the fact is, that we've basically got one exchange with 90% of the volumes, which doesn't have the infrastructure to cope with the market at the moment. We've also got a non-functioning market based on BTC exchange for goods/services, namely because of the volatile Gox. And people here are talking about fundamentals...
