On-paper dips are avoided in the Galactic Milieu by its "treasuries" system, which it was initially forced into developing simply by the stunning inefficiency of spot markets.

(I earlier posted an example in fact at https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=624935.msg64947862#msg64947862)

The "treasuries" allow the game to compute for each "treasury based" asset a value per unit simply by dividing the total value of its "treasury" by the number of units in existence.

Spot markets, though, are crazy-inefficient in addition to being from, time to time, sometimes most of the time even, "just plain crazy".

Right now the game is trying to get its assets up and running on the Stellar platform, and in that process it has become painfully clear how essential it is to build strong deep buy-sides for every asset.

Back in the days when we were using the Open Transactions platform civilisations  had scripts set up that used those "Latest Rates" to set up buy offers offering to buy their own currency with other currencies at the computed rates.

But problems still arise any time some buy-side or other happens to be something one does not yet have much or any of on hand.

The staggering inefficiency of spot markets so far has led to it seemingly being necessary for each individual trading-pair on each extant venue to build its own buy-side using only its own proceeds from right there; since evidently speculative arbitrageurs are few and far between in the most-accessible venues.

This experience is why I have come to have such a focus lately on the importance of building for each and every asset as strong and deep and wide a buy-side as possible.

If fiat prices of the assets are also to be of any concern maybe dollar futures could be used to buy up vast piles of dirt cheap future dollars which when they are delivered can be used to shore up the dollar side of any asset vs dollars pairs that are found to be needed?


-MarkM-