Hey, I'm all for the burden of proof being on the accuser. That's a given, even in situations like this one where the accused behaved like like a psychopathic, selfish criminal thief, stole from his customers, and then hid behind the law like a coward to avoid taking responsibility for his actions.

Look, if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and talks like a duck, it's a fricking duck.

According to blog posts Karpeles himself wrote in 2006, he was arrested TWICE in France before he was 21 for computer fraud-related charges. One resulted in a 3-month suspended sentence. French authorities in Tokyo said they had seen confirmation of one prior conviction, but did not have details.

This was before being sentenced to a year in prison another time after "pirating" servers owned by his customers in absentia before fleeing France to Japan.

Now you are telling me that 850,000 bitcoin mysteriously "disappear" from this guy's safekeeping, a bitcoiner busts him and proves he still controls 200,000 of those which he "finds" shortly thereafter, reducing the missing bitcoin total to 650,000, and that's some kind of silly accident and we should give him the benefit of the doubt? You have to be kidding me.

Honest people don't "pirate" servers full of customer assets (by their own admission), and aren't sentenced not once but twice to JAIL time for fraud.

Honest people don't flee their home country to avoid serving a year in prison (statute of limitations runs out in May 2015, let's see if he returns to France).

Honest people show up in court and answer FinCEN's for questions.

Honest people don't "lose" 200,000 of other peoples' bitcoin and "find" them after someone else proves they have possession of them.

This guy is a bad guy. He deserves everything he has coming to him. He is a tumor in the bitcoin community and needs to be put in jail for a very long time. I hope he's convicted and gets Bernie Madoff as his bunkmate.