RE: BitShares Global Settlement and Chain Freeze
I've always thought the global settlement mechanism was flawed. Because those with the least collateral should be forced settled long before the responsible ones are at risk. And that clearly didn't happen.
To me, the trigger that brought the system down started many months ago when the bots took over the market.
For a long time I was wondering which person in their right mind would sell bts under the margin call price.
And it was true: no person did, only bots.
It was revealed in one of the new block explorers that only bots were trading at the ridiculous prices.
So with these new bots almost no margin calls were getting bought for many, many months.
Until suddenly some months ago somebody bought a huge chunk of bts and I finally got margin called at 0.12usd. I was quite sad but now it almost feels lucky.
Because after that the bots rushed in and drove the price down even further.
So I think it's important to rethink the whole global settlement mechanism to protect against bot speculation.
Because it also makes the system vulnerable if somebody intentionally wanted to crash the price of bts.
Anyway I'm sorry for all the responsible investors who lost money. I still believe in bitshares and hope the system recovers strongly from this.
Interesting point, thank you. I’ve yet to see a way to effectively remove bots. They are a part of our ecosystem, regardless of how we feel about them. Also, one of BitShares biggest adoption challenges is lack of liquidity. If bots can bring that, that’s a good thing. Maybe we just need smarter bots.
I agree, bots are not necessarily bad. I just noticed the pattern that they weren't really market making.
They just kept underbidding each other and everyone else no matter the price. So I've tried to tell all the bot makers on steemit to take that into consideration when programming. Because obviously market makers are great for liquidity as you mention.