IMO, this was built to demonstrate one of the unique characteristics of Bitcoin. The ability to track transactions linked to addresses not owned by you, in this case, lets all participants see in realtime whether the owners are living up to their promises. Had Bernie Madoff used Bitcoin, his reign would have been over in a few minutes.
Minutes? Really? Because that's how most people measure their investments. The only way you could see if 'he was living up to his promises' was if he just speculated on more bitcoins, which would be dumb.
The point was that you could see where the money was going. If there were a Bitcoin based stock exchange and it published its addresses for stock purchases, when money from pooled funds started going to addresses outside of those known addresses, people would immediately know that the money has gone somewhere it shouldn't have.
>money from pooled funds started going to addresses outside of those known addresses
What? It's a stock exchange. By definition the money is immediately going to go to the counter-party in a trade. So it's going to be an unknown address. Stock exchanges aren't the ones selling stock...
Yeah, no kidding. But you're saying the counterparties couldn't register those addresses publicly with the exchange so that everyone knows where the money is going? Alternatively, the exchange itself (a trusted party) couldn't receive the coins first and then send them to the counterparties?
This transaction is where everything went wrong. I think after the shutdown they tried to start paying out the largest investors manually and missed a decimal place:
