Auctioneer bidding on the auctioned item is perfectly fine around the world in various auctions. It's a form of concealed reserve price.
I have never, never heard about auctions who allow a person auctioning an item to bid on it in order to set a concealed reserve price. Again, do you have examples of auction houses that allow that?
I can imagine an auction house allows that if they take
10-15% commission. And if the seller bids 20 million on his own item, I can imagine they don't mind taking 2-3 million of his money as commission so that he can buy back his own item.
That high commission makes it very unattractive to the seller to do.
You say it's allowed under US law. Personally, I have nothing to do with their law, as I'm not in their country. Whether it's allowed or not, it strikes me as "weird" to bid on your own auction, and it's certainly not something I would expect to happen. And I'm not the only one. In your auction thread, you surprised
wheelz1200,
Lairew,
acharias,
Lincoln6Echo and
minerjones.
On the other hand, thread
USER ANDUCK Bidding on own auction.. was opened 1.5 years after the auction, and based on
User Vod abusing DT position (petty red-rating with provable lies as a reason) it really looks like a personal conflict between the two of you.
Thanks for a sensible take on this.
I'm also not under the US law. I am mentioning it because o_e_l_e_o mentioned things about it. Also when speaking of auction standards, the US law may show some hints about those, in general.
I perfectly understand your view of seeing it as weird & unexpected. It was unclarity in the auction rules, which I'm of course responsible of. Yet it's not dishonesty or scamming. Auction rules were the same for everyone, regardless of the role of one of them being the auctioneer. Auctions in general are not some "who gets whatever the cheapest", even though some people
these days see them as such. It's not necessarily so. Most auctions come with a reserve, hidden or disclosed. When speaking of standards, the standard at least in US law is that an auction comes with a reserve price. I now know that this is not the standard in bitcointalk forums, and I perfectly understand the weirdness it causes when it's not stated whether there's a reserve or not. (This forum is used to non-written no reserve price being the standard.)
But yes, this is not about the auction. This is a personal conflict between me and Vod. I've been saying this all the time, yet people drag this auction in the discussion and try to reason Vods wrongdoing to be the correct. Vod is
provably lying. People don't comment that at all, which strikes to me as very weird.
For what it's worth, TMAN opened that thread because we had a stupid personal conflict back then, which was btw quickly resolved. Funny how long-lasting effect it has.