Hey, I'm all for the burden of proof being on the accuser.

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.

Remember, 850,000 bitcoin mysteriously "disappeared" from this guy's safekeeping which he blamed on transaction malleability (anyone who knows what that is knows this was a convenient excuse and incredibly likely to be a lie). 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.

Here are some questions to answer...

Do honest people "pirate" servers full of customer assets (by their own admission)?

Are honest people sentenced not once but twice to JAIL time for fraud?

Do honest people 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)?

Do honest people fail to show up in court and answer FinCEN's questions in situations where they were responsible for hundreds of millions of other peoples' money?

Do honest people "lose" 200,000 of other peoples' bitcoin and "find" them after someone else proves they have possession of them?

Call me a skeptic regarding his innocence. That may be the understatement of the century. I hope justice is served with extreme prejudice, and anyone complicit in any wrongdoing is also served justice in a court of law.

Bitcoin doesn't need anymore black eyes. It's time to clean house and cut out the tumors.

What I find interesting is, all of this was possible to do without any new "regulations". I'm having trouble reconciling the need for new regulations on bitcoin when people are clearly being held accountable for criminal activity without them.