If the person who owned the book is the same as the bidder, or in cahoots, they can buy cryptocurrency with dirty money, buy the book at an inflated price, get ostensibly legitimate money back but have to pay the auction house a commission for the privilege. Since most of the crypto world does not do AML-KYC, it is a very attractive for money laundering, and I would say this is by design.
Not if it’s a pump and dump. The DAO collected a couple million dollars of other people’s money and used it to win an expensive auction, thus “proving” that the idea is worth lots of money. Now their second DAO can collect even more because it’s been legitimized.
