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Bot Farm Card Dumping Doesn't Scale

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@imno
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Crypto markets are mostly small and illiquid. This is why when I decide I want to sell some cards, I usually just put a few up at a time even if I want to sell 100 of them (with a few exceptions). Anything more than that and chances are I'd be creating at a wall of inventory that other sellers will have no choice but to heavily undercut.

Walls of inventory also make it very unattractive to buyers because it's easy to see the price is not going to go up anytime soon and it's likely to go down.

In illiquid markets, walls of inventory from a single seller are a huge form of market distortion.

One large seller can destroy an entire market. Even if a card is popular you'd never know it if a single whale who doesn't care what they are selling and just puts 1500 of them on the market because they'll get 1000 more of whatever it is tomorrow anyway.

In this environment natural markets that reflect the ideas of the majority can't exist.

This is what's happening right now with the largest bot farms. Take a look around CL cards right now and you'll see accounts like firevault who has tens of thousands of bot accounts and is probably awarded as many CL packs in rewards each season doing mass pack openings and card dumps.

This account is literally putting up walls of 1500 copies of cards at one time or hundreds of legendaries and even walls of gold foil legendaries. Want to know why nothing can hold any value? This is a big reason why.

Remember, Splinterlands economy was designed so that each thing stacks. A high dec price means a high card price. High card price means high dec price. If any element takes out another, the whole ecosystem suffers.

And this is the problem with bot farms. The scale they are operating at is larger than the market can even handle. If instead of one bot farm with 35k bots all feeding into one account with a sell button, this was going to 35k individuals not acting as one mind, this situation would never happen. Some of those 35k people might even be buyers of those cards.

But even if this was not individual accounts but 350 bot farms of 100 bots each it would be way different than this.

When it comes to bots I have a lot of thoughts. I'm really of two minds with them and I think they have become a necessary evil in Splinterlands. The problem here is the scale of single bot farms.

35k bots in one farm comprises about 15-20% of all active players. A single farm of that size can't maneuver in the market without crushing something. It just can't be done.

In natural markets 20% of all accounts would never all at once decide to do the exact same thing at the exact same time and for the exact same price.

(This is a card that was going for $0.80 last week in a natural market)

I don't want to eliminate bots and I don't really have a great fix for this. Maybe it fixes itself just because it becomes unsustainable for these bot farms to keep growing but right now, these bot farms of this size are just too big to allow the markets to be healthy and the team really needs to look at this.

If you have the ear of @yabapmatt, please bring this up. I know they are looking at bots and the rewards they get but it seems they are looking more about whether a single bot can get more rewards than a single human rather than the market dynamics of what happens when a bot farm with tens of thousands of bots decides to make a move in the market.

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