The part that intrigues me is the whole security aspect of it. Take your average bright guy and say "Lets set up a place where people can store and move around gold coins. All the gold coins are going to sit in your living room, and of course if anyone were to get there hands on those coins they could melt them down into pieces and resell them so that you never knew where they went. There is going to be more than a million dollars worth of coins in your living room, do you think you're door lock is up to it?"
Ok so its a stretch, but Bitcoin has two interesting properties, one it is pretty fungible, and two most if not all governments consider it about as 'real' as the gold in World of Warcraft. If CFAA doesn't apply (say the server is outside the US) then what exactly would you even charge someone with who "stole" 1000 BTC? It isn't recognized as currency by any jurisdiction on the planet as far as I can tell, so what got stolen? Numbers? Block chain data?
This fairly unique combination of properties quite possibly make Bitcoin the ideal target for thieves. Better than cash, better than raw gemstones, better than pretty much anything except possibly bearer bonds [1]. Have you seen how much security there is around vaults that hold bearer bonds?
And yet people create exchanges or wallet services or whatnot and then seem shocked when they get compromised by very sophisticated programmers [2], that steal all their BTC? You are surprised?
Given these huge thefts where is the money going? I mean is there a steady stream of redemptions at exchanges? Is there a note in the chain when the coin is transacted for cash? Should there be?
[1] http://www.investopedia.com/articles/bonds/08/bearer-bond.as...
[2] When the payoff is huge, the risk small, you can pay someone a lot of money if they are good to get you the coins.