my assessment based on the statements of others that knew him better was that he got bored with MtGox very quickly and was distracted with side projects, such as the bitcoin foundation, bitcoin ATM's and the bitcoin cafe he was building downstairs from MtGox (apparent sunk cost of $2M+).
the tech guy that Roger Ver bought in when Gox was at crisis point talked about how despite the state of emergency Karpeles would leave the office mid-work-day to go and pick some silly color scheme for the new bitcoin cafe.
This is days/hours before Gox was going under.
The other part was inability to delegate and lack of trust in the code that wasn't his own. Despite his lack of interest in Gox, he still was the central (and choke point) in all site updates (which he merged manually, no source control) which explained the lack of development.
In getting MtGox into trouble I don't think he was intentionally fraudulent, just a bad case of dev project ADD. In terms of the lying and cover up, he definitely was - but seems like the type of person who doesn't realize how serious that is.
In terms of culpability, the DOJ indictment with his name on it (which i'm 95% certain exists) won't distinguish between incompetence/ignorance and willful fraud.
the tech guy that Roger Ver bought in when Gox was at crisis point talked about how despite the state of emergency Karpeles would leave the office mid-work-day to go and pick some silly color scheme for the new bitcoin cafe.
This is days/hours before Gox was going under.
The other part was inability to delegate and lack of trust in the code that wasn't his own. Despite his lack of interest in Gox, he still was the central (and choke point) in all site updates (which he merged manually, no source control) which explained the lack of development.
In getting MtGox into trouble I don't think he was intentionally fraudulent, just a bad case of dev project ADD. In terms of the lying and cover up, he definitely was - but seems like the type of person who doesn't realize how serious that is.
In terms of culpability, the DOJ indictment with his name on it (which i'm 95% certain exists) won't distinguish between incompetence/ignorance and willful fraud.