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- He chooses a coin that has 'matured', meaning many users bought such coins, and consequently the escrow fund has a lot of money in it. Let's call them X_coins, where X is e.g. the share of a company.
- Next, he buys a HUGE amount of REAL shares of the company, resulting in a considerable rise of the value of share X.
- Then, he sells all his X_coins to the escrow fund. If the number of coins is unlimited, he makes a HUGE profit, and the escrow fund goes bankrupt.
- As the last step, he sells his real company shares.
His profit will be the initial value of the escrow fund - minus some losses due to the response of the market.
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The attack you describe would only work on a very fast-acting escrow fund. Attempts at market-manipulation like this simply result in both prices moving, slightly out of step with each other. The escrow fund only corrects very long-term differences, not short-term differences.
Thanks for clarification! But I didn't say that everything has to happen instantaniously. I can wait until the escrow fund has stabilized again and then sell my coins.
But to further analyze this, I have another question regarding the aggression factor - I am not sure whether this one has been discussed.
Consider the following scenario:
1 (real) share of a company X is traded for 100 USD. Let's further assume 1 USD is traded for 1 Mastercoin, so 1 share is roughly 100 Mastercoins, and consequently 1 Xcoin is traded for 100 Mastercoins. Let's assume that the aggression factor is such that the equilibrium of the coin sets in after 1 week.
Let's assume that some bad news about the company become public, and the real value of the share instantaneously drops to 50 USD.
According to your paper, the escrow fund now tries to decrease the price of a Xcoin steadily to 50 Mastercoins, by trying to flood the market with Xcoins. So it trades Xcoins beginning at 100 Mastercoins and steadily decreases the price until 50 Mastercoins are reached after 1 week. That's the idea, right? What remains unclear in the paper: At any time within this week, at which price does the escrow fund
- sell Xcoins?
- buy Xcoins?
Escrow fund selling Xcoins: I assume that no sane person will buy Xcoins for - let's say - 90 Mastercoins on the first day, because it is clear that they will be worth only 50 Mastercoins after a week. So trading will interrupt for a week.
Escrow fund buying Xcoins: Obviously, the escrow fund has to set the price to 50 Mastercoins or less - instantly! Otherwise, people can sell their coins to the escrow fund and buy cheap ones a week later, which would ruin the fund.
Does the 'aggression factor' only apply to the fund selling Xcoins? But assuming sanity of people, that won't work.
Can you please clarify? Thanks
edit: The opposite thing of course if the share suddently hoiks. In this case, does the 'aggression factor' only apply to the fund buying Xcoins?