On the Peter Schiff interview the Bitcoing guy (Donald Norman) kept saying over & over that he wanted more regulation for Bitcoins.
You people using these things are going to get screwed in every possible way.
I heard this too. He's not the first bitcoin promoter begging for regulation, which is weird... these folks should know it's decentralized, and that regulating it will work as well as regulating torrents. I have to imagine most of these advocates are being deliberately misleading, in the hopes of making bitcoin go mainstream more quickly or something. Or perhaps some are just statists who bought in early and now want the govn't to somehow help protect their gains.
As far as dealing with thefts....
The entire bitcoin transaction chain is public, but it's not as "trackable" as that sounds. The way it works, even if you could follow "a bitcoin" through a hundred transactions and finally find an address that ties to a public identity, could you really go to just THAT person and demand compensation? And since the reality is that any given "single bitcoin" will get fractured and reassembled (with other coins) dozens of times through the course of those transactions, you'd likely be looking at dozens, if not hundreds of "recipients" of any stolen bitcoin.
Whether this is all a good thing or a bad thing is subjective. But considering one of the points of bitcoin is to have a near-cash-like level of anonymity, I think most in the bitcoin community aren't going to be too concerned about it. People lose cash. Thieves steal it. Same with bitcoins.