I'd humbly ask you allow for the possibility that start-up investors, VCs and otherwise, do sometimes act outside own best interests. I do this work -- when I could do anything -- because I like helping young companies. Maybe it’s selfish because I used to be them.
I don't think it's selfish (god knows there's a hell of a lot of Bitcoin businesses which won't survive without mentors) but I do believe that it's led more than one investor in the Bitcoin world to make toxic investments they might not have made on a purely financial basis. It's a bit like the dotcom era in that everyone wants to discover the next wunderkind, there's a lot of nebulous enthusiasm floating around, and a lot - perhaps the majority - of apparently promising deals will go sour before this relatively new sector stabilises.
I doubt there's anyone associated with Bitcoinica who wouldn't make at least some different decisions given the chance. Nobody set out to find themselves in the situation they're in now - not you, not Amir, not Patrick, not Donald, not Jesse, not Jed, not Roger, not Brian, and certainly not average Bitcoinica users.
I don't believe for a minute that any of the funds stolen in the MtGox intrusion would have been recovered without your intervention, and you're right that it required non-trivial risk on your part. Hopefully the recovered funds will eventually be released to the liquidator for distribution to Bitcoinica creditors but right now even that remains unfortunately uncertain.
I think what many people find frustrating about this whole debacle is that while the individual decisions made by the various players throughout this drama are understandable in isolation, they have combined to produce an outcome in which everybody loses. It's now a hopelessly adversarial situation which benefits no-one and in which the various parties are all equally convinced that they are "right".
I'm not going to argue that it's somehow immoral for VCs and other investors to act to protect their positions when things go wrong - few would live to invest in high risk ventures another day if they didn't. And it's not "the worst" when they do so. People might perceive it as somehow more personal, but it's not like more mainstream funding sources don't do the same thing every day of the week.
In business, as always, you're as popular as your last success or your last failure. While it's true that everyone associated with Bitcoinica is currently tainted by that association, we can all cite business people who've had far bigger failures and returned triumphant. Bitcoinica will one day be a footnote and nothing more. It's only going to define those associated with it if they let it and if they never go on to do anything more successful - and you all have plenty of time left for more successful ventures in the future.
I think that everyone just wants this to be over and everyone is extremely frustrated that there's little they can do to bring the Bitcoinica drama to a close. It seems like it's been dragging on forever even though it's only 12 months since the Rackspace intrusion and just over 6 months since Bitcoinica was put into liquidation.
