It would suprise me greatly if Zhou is responsible for this.
I do not have access to any first-hand evidence that would implicate Zhou.
I work on behalf of the fund that invested in Bitcoinica. I have no position of authority with Bitcoinica LP.
When it was made known to me that some suspected Zhou, my recommendation was to confront him privately for his explanation.
In the internal email dump from genjix you are quoted as having written the following:
Speaking of that, Zhou I wanted your thoughts on the financial situation.
As you know, Bitcoinica went from cranking out 6-figure profit one month to
a flatline the next. I covered most of the deficit from the hack on the
assumption Bitcoinica profits would quickly fill in the rest. What's
happened instead is a consistent equity leak that has remained unresolved
for two months. We've gone from being short 40k to now being short 88k.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=93109.msg1039996#msg1039996Has the reason for that been accurately explained? That is, did Bitcoinica ever - provably - profit to the degree that Zhou claimed it did when you bought it?
One interesting line of thought is that the only one who's ever made a profit from operating Bitcoinica is Zhou, and if the service didn't make a profit from trading the only other explanation is that the "profit" came directly out of user deposits. To cover that up regular "hacks" were simply needed.