Um he did lie to you. He lied (by omission) when he took depositor funds and used them in a speculative, unregulated manner without disclosing it. He also lied when Bitcoinica failed and he was insolvent. He continued to lie for over a year hiding this material fact from depositors including new ones who deposited funds into an entity they were unaware was massively in debt (good money after bad).
I agree with you. I lied, to cover up the situation, hoping it could be resolved quicker without pissing anyone off. And by that I ended only worsening the situation. I should notify everyone about this right after the fact, but that seems obvious only now - back then it seemed a good solution.
He didn't "come clean" he simply couldn't payout withdraws (much like a ponzi) and had no choice but to admit the issue.
I will somewhat "come clean" from this after this gets resolved. And even then, people still will have right to be angry over this because I made their funds frozen for such long time.
But please, don't put me in the same bag with mybitcoin. The guy just dissapeared with people's funds and provided no solution for this. Also, his core business was storing the coins safely, which he completely broke. I on the other hand did everything in my power to provide great exchange experience, and this was going quite well I think. It's a shane that I failed on the storage part...