Personally, I think Bitcoin is currently a tulip bulb mania, not a Ponzi scheme. (It might one day also be an interesting payment mechanism, but that's not why most people at MtGox bought Bitcoin.)
That said, I don't think the average investor has the chops necessary to fully evaluate a bank, which is effectively what MtGox was. The information asymmetries are just too severe. In this case, depositors didn't lose money on Bitcoin itself, but in what was basically a bank collapse due to negligence or fraud. (Or both; we don't know yet.)
One solution is to always blame the victims. You can't go wrong there! But the solution that I prefer is to regulate banks, and forbid unregulated banks from operating in the regulators' jurisdictions. This oops-the-money-is-all-gone horseshit is exactly the kind of thing an auditor or a bank regulator would have spotted in their first week.
That said, I don't think the average investor has the chops necessary to fully evaluate a bank, which is effectively what MtGox was. The information asymmetries are just too severe. In this case, depositors didn't lose money on Bitcoin itself, but in what was basically a bank collapse due to negligence or fraud. (Or both; we don't know yet.)
One solution is to always blame the victims. You can't go wrong there! But the solution that I prefer is to regulate banks, and forbid unregulated banks from operating in the regulators' jurisdictions. This oops-the-money-is-all-gone horseshit is exactly the kind of thing an auditor or a bank regulator would have spotted in their first week.