He claims that he lent 202,000 bitcoins to a mysterious "Big One," but has no proof of such a loan occurring (Shavers depo p. 232). He claims his mystery borrowers paid him every week, and tries to claim several places he never paid current investors from new deposits, not a Ponzi, etc. He claims he repaid 100,000 BTC from his personal funds after Oct. 3, 2012, but can't prove that either. (p. 260.) Whatevs, loser.
As for the question about comparison with Mt.Gox, the government alleges that he received "at least 732,050 bitcoins in principal investments." That's much higher than I thought; the common figure was 500,000 in fictional account balances (with much less actual capital due to the absurd interest rates).
Of course for the ultimate in Bticoin conspiracy theories Mark Karpeles of MTGox could be the mysterious "Big One" here. What I found really interesting is that:
1) The BTC sales from Mark Karpeles' account ended in early August 2012 just before the collapse of Bitcoin Savings & Trust.
2) The total amount of sales from Mark Karpeles' account amounted to approximately 200000 BTC
My source for the above is
http://mark-karpeles.com/ before it was taken down.
For example consider that Pirate started to get really nervous in late July 2012 and cut off Karpeles from further financing. Karpeles retaliated by defaulting on the entire amount.
