Most of economics depends pretty heavily on the concept of "efficient" markets but in my experience, admittedly mostly in dealing with roleplaying game players and a multi-currency, multi-asset game (the Galactic Milieu) players cannot be relied upon to play the markets in suffient quantities and with sufficient diligence to actually make the markets anywhere even close to "efficient".
It is partly for that reason that the Milieu uses a "treasuries" system, which works like a kind of reverse of the common "market cap" concept you see on crypto aggregator sites.
With the "treasuries" system instead of looking at last price or highest current buy offer or a moving average or depth-adjusted average etc of such things to figure out a price for an asset then multiply that by the number in existence to compute a "market cap" we do the opposite: we add up the value of an asset's "treasury", treat that as if it were the "market cap", and divide it by the number in existence to find how much each instance in existence is worth.
Thus for example a Corp or currency having a hundred million units in existence and a "treasury" of a whole bitcoin would be computed as having a value per share coin token etc (instance) of one satoshi (one hundred-millionth of its total "treasury").
The results of those calculations, after looping them like a spreadsheet until an interation of the loop no longer changes the outcome (to 8 decimals) is uploaded periodically as the Latest Rates include-file, in which usually DeVCoin, being usually the smallest aka lowest-value item in the list, appears at a rate 0f 1.00000000 although of course the list can thence be converted to use any of the items on it to be what is used to denominate any of the others, or of course other arbitrary values can be used in terms of which to re-denominate all the others.
Years ago using the Open Transactions system the include-file would then be used to three different scales of markets, since in Open Transactions one could scale markets so one could have a retail scale market with one set of prices, a medium range or business to business or whatever market dealing in "lots" of hundreds or thousands or ten-thousands at a time, and a wholesale or largest market dealing in "lots" even larger; that let us offer players a way to buy wholesale cheaper and sell retail at a profit, by buying for example in "lots" of 10,000 of a thing at a time and re-selling on the one-at-a-time market.
We didn't even use decimals back then, so that an asset being too expensive to buy whole ones of could thus act like a higher denomination of something smaller. So in those days the prices showing prices with decimals in the value-in-DeVCoins would have required some even cheaper thing to use for the decimals. That, I figured, could help make sure there remained a use for copper pieces, silver pieces, gold pieces, platinum pieces, jade pieces, and amberium pieces like in various roleplaying games.
The thing is, it simply has not seemed to "work" to try to depend upon there being a constantly vigilant constantly active player-base playing the markets for the "spot markets" to ever really hope to approach the "efficiency" of directly calculating values from "treasuries", especially because no one entity in the game ought really ever have enough of the information, instantly enough, about what every asset was putting into its "treasury" moment to moment, even if we don't let anything once put into a "treasury" come out of it other than maybe in trade for an equivalent (by the same calculations) value of something else.
Thus we just publish the calculated Latest Rates then any players actually bothering to worry about the efficiency of "spot markets" can run around looking for "bargains" in the sense of anything they can find for sale on any venue that they can pick up for less than its latest calculated value.
In practice, not a lot of players ran around doing that "bargain hunting" aka arbitrage; then someone totally trashed the spot market (on Stellar platform) price of HZ, the native coin of the HORIZON platform on which such bargain hunting took place, prompting pretty much all the players to delete all their sell offers on the HORIZON platform since unfortunately on HORIZON all trading-pairs are whatever versus HZ.
So hey if you are into arbitrage and can motivate some others to also get into it that could be great for market efficiency, so far "spot markets" have been seeming to be really crappy way to calculate prices in the game, our direct spreadsheet-like "treasuries based" system has so far seemed much more "efficient".
By the way, that is even despite the fact that typically each treasury-based asset also has at least one "slush fund", a pile of assets that are not computed into the value calculation, and ideally in fact one's "slush fund" ought to be worth as much as one's official treasury or more since one's "slush fund" is what one would draw upon to place buy offers on "spot markets" to cause sites like CoinMarketCap, CoinGecko etc to think your asset has value by their own "look at the buy offers or latest buys" system of coming up with values for things.
Ultimately in order to have "spot markets" calculate a price close to your calculated value based on your treasury, you could need as much value piled into your buy offers on the spot markets as you have in your treasury. So all these Latest Rates are basically deliberately really presumably under-estimations of value.
-MarkM-
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