You are a good man, jewelrytech, and I admire your words. I'll admit, I would like to see some financial gain. I bought some gox/btc on bitcoinbuilder.com back when it was still open. It would be great to see those worth something someday, but I didn't invest enough that it matters to me very much if I lose the dough or not, and I do have only very minimal expectations of ever making any gain. It has merely given me some motivation to care about what happens. Also, my son lost 7 btc on Mt. Gox, so I would love to see him get his money back, as right now he could really use it. Does that make me greedy? Probably, at least a little bit. However, I have got interested in the whole Mt. Gox affair as kind of like a murder mystery. I'm trying to look at the matter objectively, as dispassionately as possible, and try to figure out "who-dun-it".

There's always the obvious choice of "the butler did it"--in other words, Mark Karpeles. He was standing closest to the scene when Mt. Gox bit the dust. Many people have personalized the matter like he ran off with their bitcoins himself. I don't wish to defend him, yet there are no excuses possible for ridiculing his physical appearance or ethnicity, as if those things actually had anything to do with the matter.

Brock Pierce is another example of personalization--like MK. I don't know the gentleman, and have no opinion about him one way or the other. You say he is "scum", and perhaps so, yet the general public, like me, who are not familiar with him or his background, shouldn't make such assumptions without some actual proof. He is a public person, been an actor, so he's been out there, and people will say all kinds of derogatory things about someone in the limelight like that--for whatever reason they may have. I would prefer to give this man the benefit of the doubt, unless of course I knew for an absolute fact that he was guilty of some heinous misdeeds.

You say you care about the future of bitcoin as a whole, and I believe that, but perhaps something you have not given sufficient weight to, is that a very large amount of funds have disappeared in Mt. Gox--not just bitcoin, but $27 million in cash. The cash alone would probably qualify the take-down of Mt. Gox as one of the biggest robberies of the century, let alone the vast amount of BTC gone. The explanations for what happened really don't add up. The Mt. Gox collapse, due in part to its magnitude, has besmirched the reputation of bitcoin, and made people worry about the safety of any funds they have to invest. The least informed people, are the ones most frightened by all the FUD generated by this event. So if you truly care about bitcoin, as I'm sure you do, you'll want to get to the bottom of this mystery too, and help clear the air for the public.

To me, it appears to have been a case of "asset stripping"--if you don't know what that is, please look it up. Mt. Gox could have been a case of "internal" stripping done by Karpeles or other insiders, or else by external sources, or some mixture of both. Something you don't seem aware of is the parties responsible for taking down Mt. Gox have been laying down a public relations smokescreen to distract people from seeing what they're doing. They would like nothing better than to  have you or me obsess about the character of some personality who is only tangentially connected to the whole affair like Pierce. The more you or I bitch about such an individual, the less focus there will be on the actions of the perpetrators.

My compliments to Phinnaeus Gage on all his fantastic detective work, yet it would be great to tone down the rhetoric just a little and focus in more on conducting a serious investigation, which hasn't happened yet. Individual people who have an interest in Mt. Gox, or bitcoin as a whole, need to find answers to many questions. Here's a few to chew on:
(1) Three months after the collapse of Mt. Gox, why is no one charged with any crime, or in jail?
(2) Why has nobody--Mark Karpales, or anyone else connected to Mt. Gox--said even one word to defend themselves? Does that mean they been silenced, and, if so, by whom, and for what reason?
(3) What was the role of governments in this take-down. Were Mt. Gox's assets seized by one or more agencies?
(4) Were the activities of bots such as Willy and Markus implicated? It seems too much of a coincidence that 650,000 btc were traded by these bots, and that is the exact same amount now missing from Mt. Gox.
(5) Are Mt. Gox's Japanese banks behind the alleged asset-stripping, or at least the disappearance of the $27 million in bank deposits. What's up with that?

Peace!