Just because they have a nice graphic with many little arrows pointing everywhere doesn't mean it's going to work better than what we have.

I'm not against experimenting either, within reasonable bounds. All I'm saying is that

a) using the DEX price for the feed is dangerous because such feedback loops tend to oscillate, and
b) there is no such thing as a "correct" feed price when external markets are skewed due to political boundaries, so it is pointless to argue about it.

I think they should declare that only those BTS owner who give out the vote power can get airdrop.

Actually they do mention this explicitly in their terms. You have to actually read them to see it of course. :-)

The intent of BSIP-18 is not to allow people to do something good for the community. Its intent is to provide a mechanism for revival, and incentives to use it. This has worked out nicely.

Bidding "at the last minute" makes sense, economically, if you want to acquire as much from the pool as possible. Just like on ebay, bidding early only drives the price up. IMO this behaviour is neither benevolent nor malevolent. It can be called selfish, but that's OK - we're acting in a market here, and participants are expected to act selfish. That's just how things work.

Note that the bidders has also accepted a significant risk with this investment. If the BTS price drops again, he might lose all of it.

FTR - BitUSD has been revived a couple of hours ago.

If your buffer is small you can do this repeatedly (even within a single transaction).

If you've already been margin called you can only get out by paying more than MSSR. This would have the effect of increasing the premium, and it would use up the available collateral more quickly. Not sure if either is desirable.

Please provide links to what has been said and done for the sake of information.

There are several posts in this forum where it is discussed. This thread here is almost 4 weeks old, for example.
There are several articles on steem that talk about this, for example https://steemit.com/community/@erodedthoughts/bitshares-scam-proposed-permission-update
It was/is discussed in various telegram groups.
It was/is discussed on discord.

The UI has made approving proposals a 3-step-process, see post from Stefan above. Unfortunatly, people have been taught for years that whenever their computer pops up a box they MUST NOT READ IT and the MUST CLICK ON OK.

I think if there is one downside to decentralization is that there is no leader or CEO to take charge and provide the drive and vision going forward...

Absolutely!

witness_node does not replay automatically on every restart because replay takes a long time.
Instead, on shutdown it rewinds its internal database for a couple of blocks and then dumps it to disk. On restart it checks if such a dump is present, and if so it loads the dump and resumes from that point.

If your plugin also uses the internal database, like the market plugin, then your plugin state will also be dumped and reloaded automatically.

Note that you *should* use the internal database for storing your plugin state, because otherwise it will be difficult to handle chain forking correctly.