it is nothing like a bank run.

A bank run is where the bank does not hold enough money to cover everyones deposits. Bitstamp have enough BTC to cover everyones deposits they just are delaying withdrawals for 72 hours. Think of it like you rbank telling you you need to wait 3 days for a transaction to go through, not that unlikely and in fact quite common in traditional banking. It seems longer in bitcoin though because of the usually quick transactions.

> Think of it like you rbank telling you you need to wait 3 days for a transaction to go through

Moreover, with banks you have this every weekend.

ATMs and credit cards work 24/7 so no, banks do not close every weekend

You must not have ever tried to deposit a check for a moderate or significant amount on a Friday afternoon. Unless you've already set up a process with your bank, you'll only have access to part of the funds for 24 to 72 hours.

Except when there's a technical screw-up, in which case you can find that no, you can't use ATMs or your cards for several days whilst it's fixed. This happens with some UK bank or the other every year or so at the moment, as I recall.

Same here in the Netherlands.

Also iDeal, a very popular online dutch payment system that integrates with almost all banks, has only like 95% uptime.