Quote from: Desolator on August 31, 2011, 07:39:03 PM

Quote from: kjj on August 31, 2011, 02:45:30 PM

Quote from: Desolator on August 31, 2011, 01:19:19 PM

You're overstating the importance of bots. The only inherently bad or unfair part is when they outbid you purely based on speed and get a deal you wanted. Otherwise bots do precisely what a human tells them to so they can program it to trade fairly or like a jerk. A human can manually set up unfair trades and scams and that sort of thing, just not as quickly. So really the bot isn't that important.

Tell me more about these unfair trades. Start with exactly what about a trade makes it unfair.

I'm no shady strategist so I bet I'm missing a lot simpler ideas and also, ones proposed above do not actually work out to a profit mathematically.

I do wonder why you are calling out a hero member as a shady strategist, but I haven't read all of kjj's posts, so he could be I guess.

Quote from: Desolator on August 31, 2011, 07:39:03 PM

One basic examples would be anything that involves posting offers then buying your own offers back after whatever you were trying to do was done. Also, making bots pretend to be multiple people to anyone watching just the anonymous stats.
One implementation of that would be let's say I operate some kind of company thing or whatever so I have 100,000 BTC sitting around. I actually have 14 BTC sitting around myself so no, this isn't me Tongue

this is hypothetical me lol. I want to make some money using that 100,000 so I use a bot to post a ton of very close to each other groups of 50 at a couple cents above the price. That prevents the price from going up for a few days and makes it appear, from the volume, that the price is really stable and not going to raise any time soon. That encourages buyers to pick up some of my BTC sell offers. As soon as 50% of the offers have succeeded or 2 days have passed, whichever happens first, that's 2 days at let's say $9.00 and quite a few people bought in at the new stabilized price since they know it's a safe time to buy when the price hasn't changed a lot lately.
Then I immediately change the sell offers at like $9.01 to $7 and drive the price down the toilet and sell off all my BTC for probably an $8.75 average on the way down since a higher number of trades would occur closer to the current price than farther away. So then the tail end of my sell off results in let's say a $7.50 price. Except here's the catch: my bot artificially delayed all the trade orders so they occur over several hours and it looks like a mass sell off, not just one guy offloading 50,000 coins instantly. Everyone panics and assumes the market is crashing and sells. Before people even have time to see the graphs, you wait for the price to bottom out from the additional sell offs then buy 100,000 coins back at a $6 ea average. Now you're back with your 100,000 coins which you sold for an average of $8.75 and bought back for $6 just by scaring the crap out people with your bot and faking a sell off after faking 2 days of price stability.

I love how people can claim I overstate the importance of bots, and then back it up with an example of how a bot caused a massive price shift for the benefit of the few at the expense of the many. Ideas like this are proof that the bot paradigm needs to be seriously addressed due to it's power.

Quote from: Desolator on August 31, 2011, 07:39:03 PM

I'm pretty sure that's what just happened a week or so ago by the way. It was in the low $11 range for a looooong time and then someone dumped off a TON of coins and then suddenly a gigantic buy offer came in to shoot it eventually to $8.50 where it sits now.

Maybe, it certainly seems like a possibility. I think probably a bot set an ask wall to get the bid to meet it, then sold into an average price, and the $8.50 cost is "market correction" or whatever the speculative equivalent of correction is.