If Mt Gox were a bank, it wouldn't be big enough to make the Wikipedia list of US bank failures: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_U.S._bank_failures" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_U.S._bank_failu...</a>
(I don't have a hidden agenda with that comment - I just found it interesting.)<p>And on a totally unrelated note, pivoting off the title: I think the "failure is not an option" philosophy led to a lot of NASA's problems.
> I have some predictions: Gox will not be bailed out.<p>MtGox will not be bailed out because of the relative unimportance of bitcoin to the larger economy, not of any high-minded free market idealism.<p>Since the MtGox explosion, bitcoin prices (and therefore real purchasing power) are down by about 30%. If bitcoin were a national currency, the government would be doing everything in its power to prevent such a decline, including saving MtGox by any means possible. It would absolutely be too big to fail.<p>By way of comparison, Greece's economic woes drove its real purchasing power down by about 11%.
In line with the thinking in "Antifragile" by Taleb - failures of individuals in a population makes the the population as a whole stronger. The forrest fire example is also in the book - artificially "stabilizing" a system only sets it up for a bigger disruption later. Great book, with lots of interesting ideas.
Failure has always been an option in small, unproven, socially unimportant markets. It really shouldn't take 7 paragraphs to compare apples to oranges...