Is bitsharesX a way to circumvent this rule?

Yes.

Could the US government possibly step in and try to regulate this?

Yes, with emphasis on "try".

The risk with punishing shorts is that you break the peg the other way. If there were a lack of shorts what is going to keep the BitAsset prices from becoming overvalued?

Introducing a fee shorts have to pay for long-term holding is equivalent to the interest discussion (the thing) we had half a year ago.

This is a known feature - you don't even need two accounts

You can only create your double-sided position if the market is trading at the peg (i.e. no asks below the short wall) and if you place your short order on top of the wall (offering the highest collateral ratio).

Quote from: fussyhands on September 24, 2014, 09:11:02 pm

Interesting.  I think you have the reason wrong though.  Shorters would not compete with each other to offer lower prices because the lower the price the more likely they are to lose money, and the less money they stand to gain.  Instead, I think tying minimum prices to the feed must be to prevent shorters from intentionally forcing the price down in order to cause a panic.

I think there's a multitude of reasons to short lower & lower:
-Manipulate the market (the reason you just cited)
-Being more competitive
-Lack of availability of any bids at the fair price

I remember the first time I looked at the market I wanted to short lower because nobody was buying BitUSD until way down (reason 3)

Without the shorting restrictions in place shorting lower and lower would probably have worked down to 66% of the peg.
Below that some whale would have thought its time to feed on the krill and triggered a nice short squeeze right up to the peg - and a bit beyond.

GLD is closest to launch given the statistics.
The whole GLD sell depth is a single short at double the real price.
Is that a market?

This is a bug in the GUI. What is actually the offered collateral ratio is displayed as the price. If you check the console the limit for this short is actually 38000 - and that is even a few per cent below the peg. And it overlaps with a small buy order at 40000. As you can see, there is a market and feeds are the only thing preventing this trade from happening. (The min market depth requirement was abolished I thought)

>> blockchain_market_list_shorts GLD
AMOUNT                        COLLATERAL RATIO              COLLATERAL                    PRICE LIMIT                   ID                                     
================================================================================================================================
1.000000 GLD                  80000                         80,000.00000 BTSX             38000. GLD / BTSX             c58e39bb558e08cc6a4ca2e7c3124c97b1910f4c

svk who runs this site (http://bitsharesblocks.com/delegates) plans to add a column for feed performance of the delegates.
I assume that with this information readily available delegates not publishing enough feeds will be voted out quickly.

It's just as biophill said "cheap publicity"
If I didn't see bitshareX on coinmarketcap I probably wouldn't have even noticed it.

I found out about this whole project when I saw ProtoShares listed on coinmarketcap the first time and got curious.
Listings on coinmarketcap are definitely cheap publicity.

Full text (50 pages) available here:
minco.me/SSRN-id2425270.pdf