I'm pretty sure Middlecoin does sell at the highest bid price. h2o isn't in the speculation business. He needs to sell the coins to payout his users and he can't really risk the price dropping lower.
When I mined there for a couple of weeks and moved to this pool, I still had balances in the immature unexchanged and unexchanged balance columns for a week or two after. I understand that the immature unexchanged is still waiting for confirms but the unexchanged balance is not. I'm not sure if this is his bot's trading technique, if the price just dropped so much and he halted trading on it for a period of time or if those coins just got stuck in virtual limbo. Interesting though.
People who make a road cant be the reason for it to exist. Coins that duplicate each other are going converge most likely.
This is like the house price 'problem' If the price gets cheaper is it bad or not, for people who use houses it ultimately is a good thing to have a useful product available cheaper. Its tough luck if banks wanted it higher, they are not the users.
So I see the coins as either a useful product or not, if it does get cheaper for some reason then in a healthy market this is a good thing at least for some people who wanted to use it not profit from speculating or anything else, actual users matter most.
Capitalism is based off mutual benefit, its politics which tries to continually inflate prices and introduce bias to one partys advantage. So you have cryptsy enabling sales more easily, really that utility should be positive because theres always two sides to any sale - if there isnt that coin is DOA
Fair points, but when you have a difference of more than 10-20% between asks and bids, I don't just want to dive straight in at the cheaper price point and sell everything at that. Negotiation is a good thing and allows buyers and sellers to come to an agreed fee.