My point was that today’s random huge fall is a case in point to answer your question to me, “under what circumstances do you see a near-term collapse in value happening?”
I’d wager it’s not done falling. Especially with how obvious it has become that 1) the exchanges aren’t technically robust enough, 2) the sharp rise and bandwagon jumping has just set it up for equally large falls, 3) the ease of manipulation is more obvious to more people, and the in-your-face risk associated with it will likely make a majority of the people interested a lot less interested in the short-term.
You’re make good points – the technical weakness of exchanges is certainly a major issue. Reliance on Mt Gox also seems to be something that the larger BTC community is trying to move away from, as some of the recent fall in value is related to their service outages (they are the biggest exchange by a long shot, from what I understand).
That is pretty crazy – I’ve read a few stories about people losing their BTC wallets though, and in that case, there is basically no recourse, you have lost whatever you had. In some cases this has been thousands of dollars.