Short positions are much different than long positions. Building an exchange for long positions is simple. User A wants to buy for price P, User B wants to sell for price P. Done.
Short selling in currencies is done in one of two ways, both of which are more complicated. For normal securities like stocks, short selling is done by loaning the security. For obvious reasons, loans between anonymous cryptocurrency users is problematic. Bitfinex is one of the only exchanges supporting lending features, but it's complicated and and doesn't support STEEM. You can short BTC, but you need to borrow BTC, convert it to USD, wait some time, and then convert it back, returning the borrowed sum in BTC + interest.
The other way of shorting a currency is via a currency pair. Which involves the implicit buying and selling of currencies as the pairs are traded. Again, way more complicated then a simple long position.
Bullcrap.
It's not complicated at all.
You have a market of lenders that want to hedge and so they offer their steem for loans at say 1% daily interest. Then you have the short seller fund a margin account to cover the interest due and let them borrow whatever they can cover as an interest payment. Then let them short to their hearts content, but force a margin call before they run completely out of funds. This means you prioritize margin calls over all other orders including market orders.
This is how margin works and you can use it to go long or short.
Since it's all cleared on the exchange, nothing is needed on our end and poloniex has a dozen currencies or more you can lend or borrow and go long or short.
Short selling steem is not a good idea for the price, period point blank.
Holding SBD is already a short position. You want to short steem just buy SBD.
If you mean shorting currency you don't actually have, then all that will do is add even more liquidity to the market. The market already has WAY too much liquidity. They need a way of burning liquidity, possibly the same way we do promoted posts right now. Promoted posts help to mop up the SBD liquidity and is the primary reason SBD is $0.94 instead of $0.75 like it was a little while back.
Do the same thing for steem and the price will rise. Otherwise promote the uses of the coin by helping to build the ecosystem.
No currency has ever been made more attractive by naked shorting, except to those who want to crash the price.
I do agree on lifting the 7 day limit and I would take it a step further and say that the price avg point used should be 3 day avg instead of 7 day.
I agree with you on this williambanks
Yep... his arguments about allowing short selling somehow helping the current price didn't hold much water...
Yea, thinking about it more, I agree with you that short selling would be unlikely to help the demand for STEEM, other than to pay the interest on the loans.