Bidding wars are great.
The price of the coins on #hive-engine get set by different people wanting to accumulate the flappin' coins.
Unfortunately, Hive-Engine is dominated by bid-bots. Everytime I place a bid on Hive-Engine, a bid-bot immediately places a bid that is 0.0000001 difference from mine.
I have no problem being in a bidding war with a human. A bidding war with a robot is demoralizing.
I suspect that most Hive-Engine users feel demoralized by the bots.
It just isn't fun to use an exchange that is rigged against the retail investor.
Many users seem to use swaps instead of the exchange. The swaps are robots that hold a pile of coins. The robots occasionally buy and sell on the exchange.
Yesterday I pointed out that there was a 90% gap between the BID and ASK price of STEM. This gap existed for about three days.
Apparently someone bought some STEM with a swap. Amusingly, the STEM transaction history shows that the 
I was surprised that no-one bothered to place transactions in the gap. So, I decided to put my HIVE where my mouth is.
I borrowed one HIVE with the goal of filling in the gap. The first picture shows the gap. The bid was 0.00131601 placed by a bidbot.
I started placing a series of small bids. As you can see, i chased the bidbot up to 0.007. I filled in the gap to 0.0130
As I said in the last post. I think #STEM is a worthwhile coin. It supplements the rewards for articles on Science, Technology, Engineering and Math.
Hive-Engine has a huge problem with liquidity. The solution is for users of Hive Engine to simply place a large number of open orders. Drop orders for coins you aren't interested in holding. When sales occur, use the funds to place orders for the coins that you are interested in accumulating.
The orders for your liquid coins will help the coins find their bottoms. The buy orders for the coins you want to accumulate helps provide liquidity.
The bid-bots make Hive-Engine a demoralizing place. So, I think the solution for the bid bots is to either place a bunch of lowball bids (buy orders well below the BID price or sell orders well above the ASK price) or to layer in a bunch of orders to close the gap between BID and ASK.
It is really sad that most of the the Tribal coins have collapsed. But HIVE Engine allows people to trade coins for pennies. So, we might as well invest our pennies and buy hundreds of thousands of tribal coins.
The point of this post was to discuss the process of layering in a bunch of bids to beat a bid-bot.
