Where is the specification?

[theoretical]

Seriously...Google Docs for a cryptocurrency?  Markdown and Git would be a much better way to track revisions.

[bytemaster]

A recent white paper that addresses 99% of the recent changes in the market behavior is here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RLcjSXWuU9vBJzzqLEXVACSCdn8zXKTTJRN_LfoCjNY/edit

Changes that have been implemented to address attacks discovered since:

10x margin + 5% minimum market depth.

When someone goes short in the real world, their potential losses are infinite.  They still do it.

There will be many chains and I am sure some people will play with different settings just like with BTC.

[theoretical]

In the thread about margin requirements, I made a detailed post about the mechanics of the market, which bytemaster said is not accurate [1].

The concern I'd like to raise is that, AFAICT, information at that level of detail exists nowhere, except perhaps in the code itself.

I believe that launching the BitShares network without a detailed specification of the intended mechanics of the market will unnecessarily endanger the security, stability, and reliability of the BitShares network.  Perhaps the specification will need to be revised as issues come up in the implementation, and perhaps parts of the specification can be developed by describing the behavior of the current code.

I firmly believe that it should be possible to understand the detailed mechanics of the market without diving into the code.  For example, I have strong objections to the proposed increase in margin requirement.  Bytemaster doesn't seem to be persuaded by my concerns.  If we had a common understanding of the market mechanics, I'm certain we could resolve this disagreement fairly efficiently.  However, without a specification, we are forced to make detailed explanations of each others' mental models of how the market works, find mismatches, and then analyze each mismatch in detail.  Also, there are many I3 or bytemaster videos, forum posts, etc., floating around.  Some of these are outdated or contradictory.  (In the linked thread, I discuss how there are currently no less than three mutually contradictory I3 / bytemaster claims about what interest short positions are charged, if any.)

It would be nice to have a single place to collect all of the currently official market mechanics.

After the specification is written, I would also like to ask for some time for the community to study and discuss it, before the launch.  Even if this means delaying the launch.  Because currently, I think only bytemaster really understands the detailed mechanics of the market.  Some changes (e.g. changing margin from 2x to 10x or vice versa) would be trivial to implement before launch, but really hard to implement after launch.  In particular, in the case of changes to the mechanics which will cause some investments to benefit and others to suffer, would be very politically risky for the maintainers to implement after launch.  Fixing bugs is an entirely appropriate task for the developers after launch; changing the terms of the system's financial instruments after people have bought them is not.

[1] https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=3015.msg42198#msg42198