Building a great Bitcoin exchange, part III: unfunded orders counterproductive?

[aes1]

As we know, Mt. Gox is dropping unfunded orders as "counterproductive": https://mtgox.com/press_release_20130409.html

I think they were just fine. It would let me to things like "buy 5 BTC at $55, sell 5 BTC at $65", even though I didn't have any bitcoins in my wallet. (My bet was that the price would first go to $55 and then rise to $65). And I used to have some long-time orders open (such as "sell at $200", and "buy at $10")

Do you think this feature is actually counterproductive, and why? If so, how could you prevent people (or bots) from abusing it?

[flower1024]

i liked that feature very much.
i just had my sell order sit and send btc there which i wanted to sell.

i dont know how this feature could be counterproductive at all.
i think it could just be coded in a way that the actual trading engine only see offers which do have enough balance (this could be a preprocessing step which could easily be multithreaded).

how could a bot even abuse this?

[Come-from-Beyond]

As we know, Mt. Gox is dropping unfunded orders as "counterproductive": https://mtgox.com/press_release_20130409.html

I think they were just fine. It would let me to things like "buy 5 BTC at $55, sell 5 BTC at $65", even though I didn't have any bitcoins in my wallet. (My bet was that the price would first go to $55 and then rise to $65). And I used to have some long-time orders open (such as "sell at $200", and "buy at $10")

Do you think this feature is actually counterproductive, and why? If so, how could you prevent people (or bots) from abusing it?

It's very good feature. Ppl/bots can't abuse it if a trading engine is written by professionals.