[jamoes]

> The talk really put Karpeles in a slightly better light.

I disagree wholeheartedly. Karpeles bought an insolvent exchange, and specifically chose not to invest the money necessary to bring it back to solvency. He could have simply bought 80,000 BTC in order to make the exchange solvent (Bitcoin was trading at less than a dollar per coin at that time). Instead, he chose to defraud his customers by attempting to make up the missing money by front-running trades and other dishonest tactics.

In addition, he failed to implement basic accounting measures which resulted in him not even being aware of the fact that he would go on to be hacked multiple more times.

> Still, it seems like if he had gotten there sooner maybe that weird arbitrage bot could have made up the difference somehow and actually bailed out the company.

The "weird arbitrage bot" was fraud, plain and simple. If it had worked, it would have worked by effectively stealing value from active traders on Mt. Gox. Of course, Karpeles was too incompetent to even implement this fraud correctly, and he ended up inadvertently subsidizing traders rather than stealing from them.