The values of assets are provided in an include-file, for example
http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/latestrates.incThe asset whose value is shown as 1.00000000 is, obviously (or hopefully obviously) the asset in terms of which the values are being given in the particular case.
What used to happen, using the Open Transactions platform, was each of the "big seven" had scripts that would have three scales for each trading pair, with slightly different markups / markdowns from the include-file-given values for each scale.
For example the Brits might offer to buy Canadian Digital Notes using United Kingdom Britcoin at the 1000 coin scale, the 10000 coin scale and the 100000 coin scale, and also to sell United Kingdom Britcoin for Canadian Digital Notes at those same three scales.
(Scales seem to be unique to Open Transactions; the idea is that often commodities will be cheaper in bulk than at small scales.)
The offers might be, say, 3%, 2% and 1% above the include-file values for sell and 3%, 2% and 1% below the given values for buy, so people trading with them would get better prices at larger scales.
(The idea there was that for smaller trades, market-makers could buy bulk directly from the governments or corps and sell in bulk directly to the governments or corps, with a margin allowing them to handle smaller scale markets such as buys and sells on a one coin scale or ten coin scale or hundred coin scale making a profit doing so. Similar to how banks buy currencies for sale over the counter to customers, or how money-exchangers near airports might do so.)
So as you hopefully see there is no strategic comparison here to other "current rates" that applied on other days. The scripts just take the base values as given (by head office or wherever, basically just include a file from a URL or somewhere on disk) and place offers computed from those values.
That could mean gains or losses, the scripts do not care, their purpose is simply to make sure that it is always possible to buy or to sell three "lots" at each of three "scales" basically all the time.
So for example you could always buy three batches of 100,000 UKB using CDN, and could always sell up to three batches of 10,000 UKB for CDN, or, since the Canucks would also have such a script, you could always buy up to three batches of 100,000 CDN using UKB, or sell up to three batches of 100,000 CDN for UKB and so on.
Using the scales also gave a way to get more granularity in pricing, since all assets were integers there were only so many integer prices you could have for one coin at a time, but trading at a scale of ten thousand coins you got five times as much price-granularity as the price would be per 10,000 coins not per coin.
The thing is, the details of how Open Transactions executed trades made it un-necessary to cancel yesterday's orders/prices because the default lifetime of all orders was one day so they died automagically, and for those times when you run the script again before a full 24 hours have gone by you did not need to worry about buying from yourself or selling to yourself because if a buy order was about to eat into a sell order the sell order was automatically cancelled and vice versa. So basically your new offers would stand and if old ones would have gotten in their way or eaten into them the old ones conveniently vanished.
This was awesome as it made the scripting very simple, just put in your markup and markdown from given current purported values and post your offers. No remembering required at all.
Basically the scripts were not bots, they were just blindly posting offers based on purported prices given from on high.
-MarkM-