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April 11, 2013, 02:49:26 PM |
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(can I post here already? not sure. guess I'll find out in a second.)
Here's what I posted a few moments ago on a related thread on reddit:
Assuming spamming of micro transactions was in fact the reason for the crash (that, and of course herd animal behavior of panicked traders), shouldn't this be easily solvable?
One solution would be to demand a small fixed fee for each transaction, making it more costly for spammers to perform such an attack.
Or alternatively, and perhaps a bit more elegant would be implementing an algorithm that evaluates, based on a traders current behavior, this trader's "spam potential". Based on a few simple heuristics (number of orders per hour of that trader, average size of orders) the algorithm assigns each trader some numerical value that expresses how much like a "spammer" the trader behaves. Then, if the trading system starts suffering from lags, each trader whose "spam potential" number has reached a certain threshold will see his ability to buy/sell throttled (but the effect wears off over time).
Wouldn't that stop the problem immediately, at almost no cost (there would be the occasional false positive with the spam filter, but that's a small price to pay I think). Why doesn't mtgox implement such a trivial solution? What do they have to gain from having their trading book flooded with useless spam? And I also simply don't see what they possibly could gain from allowing such an easy way to manipulate the market.
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