The free market will sort things out.
yes always the default answer to those who are apathetic.
has a point, and you do too. I think the trouble is, we're relying on emotionally-charged buzzwords like "free market" and "greed" that conflate more than one issue.
When a new frontier generates sudden wealth, there'll always be a boom-town mentality: always. The history of every gold rush and oil boom shows it.
What's interesting about those booms is that they always attract rough-hewn characters who rise to the fore when the boom goes into top gear. Which makes sense: when wealth comes quickly, impulsiveness pays off. "Buy now or pay double" is insane in a quiet marketplace - no-one thinks that when they buy bread, except in hyperinflation - but it's a rule that works when the marketplace is volatile and what you're buying is going "to the moon!" Also, "rush this thing out or we'll be beaten!" makes sense in a hothouse of turbulent innovation but nowhere else.
The trouble with the cyber world isn't the "free market," it's that boom-town mentality combined with de facto anarchy. No sensible definition of the free market lets in outright theft: I don't mean the buzz-word "theft," I mean literal theft. Incidents where cybers are, quite literally, stolen by malicious hackers.
Related to the theft problem is an influx of people providing services who don't know what they're doing. A lot of what's called "theft" falls into this category. When combined with people coming in who don't know anything except how to use a wallet and how to hit the "buy" button on an exchange, it's inevitable that there'll be a lot of accidents waiting to happen. What else can we expect in a boom-town environment that puts a cash value on impulsiveness?
To make things even more confusing, even the smartest and most careful thinkers miss wrinkles and exploits that can only be revealed by field tests and real-world experience. Even the geniuses have limited CPU power in their wetware. Add that to the boom-town mentality and you get that limited CPU power conflated with outright incompetence. That's part of life when real-world field tests combine with quick money.
"Do something!" Another buzzword. Yes, life would be easier and we'd all be less embarrassed if the government would step in and whack the people we think act egregiously. The fact is, government officials aren't interested (outside of money laundering) and for good reason. A regulatory framework, or even a set of statutes, depends upon a stable pattern of business in the industry. One where best practices are reasonably clear-cut, and where there's a solid database of bad practices that can be clamped down upon. The reasonableness is crucial because people are good at seeing self-interest behind any purportedly idealistic reform. In this context, "reasonable" means "obvious to the point where who benefits doesn't matter." After all, people who aren't brawlers have a vested interest in the assault laws.
Case in point: airline safety regulations. They don't grate because the regulators have the knack of coming up with safety regulations that make sense. Note, though, that those regulations make sense in the context of a mature industry. Imagine imposing a regulatory framework or set of statutes on the biplane stage...
In the absence of government interest, we're basically on our own.
P.S.: "Let the free market sort it out" is another way of saying "experience is a dear school, but fools will learn in no other." (Benjamin Franklin) The former has the advantage of being more polite.
