Whilst I respect and believe in the multi signature technology you are promoting, I fail to see how it could have protected MT.Gox users from what was basically non-existant accounting audit practices. The theft from MT.Gox may have been going on for as long as two years!! and in all that time they failed to notice that the sum of their customer accounts did not come close to the sum of bitcoins in their hot and cold wallets!! That is incompetance of the highest magnitude, which was only multiplied by the incompetance of their software team failing to design/implement the Bitcoin protocol properly on their wallets.
I appreciate your point. If the company is not being run properly, there is little one can do. We will learn more as the details of the potential theft or drain comes to light. If it turns out that bitcoins were being drained out of an wallet, multi-sig and BitGo's security platform could have prevented it.
For example, when you can create a BitGo wallet you may also set rules, such as:
- no transaction should be signed by BitGo above $X
- no transaction should be signed without some manual secondary approval
- only sign a transaction after a waiting period
- only sign transactions request from a whitelisted IP address.
With those type of protections in place, even a manager who is not minding the store is protected.