There is no need for short squeeze protection imo. When a margin call happens, the system should take all orders up to a limit defined by collateral.
As the name implies, the short squeeze protection is to protect shorters for overpaying in low-liquidity markets.
Why to do this? Shorters deposit collateral to protect bitAssets. If a shorter can't maintain his collateral, use it all to buy back his debt. What's a problem with this?
Where you sit determines what you say.Where you stand depends on where you sit.
To state it explicitly, people with large short positions want to offload as much of their risk as possible to people on the long side. Hence things like short-squeeze protection and bitcrab's bizarre arguments for nonzero force-settle offsets.
It's things like this that have really weakened my trust in the BitAsset system. It seems that there is a deep incentive problem here:
If BitShares does well, people who took out short positions on BitAssets make a ton of money and gain a large share of the total stake. Since those people have short positions, they have two things:
1. Strong individual incentives to offload risk to longs, and
2. The voting power to make that a reality.
Of course, the whole point of holding BitAssets is that they're supposed to be a place to harbor oneself from price volatility and risk, and in my view, BitAssets are one of the major selling points for Bitshares overall. So if the large shorts vote their own interests myopically (which they have both the incentive and the ability to do), they weaken one of the very pillars that holds up Bitshares itself.
Maybe I'm overstating the importance of BitAssets to the overall Bitshares ecosystem? In any case, I've been aggressively reducing my exposure to BitAssets ever since I realized the magnitude of the incentive problem. The black swan risk is just too great and too difficult to quantify for me to keep significant amounts of my wealth here anymore.