I have trouble telling tongue-in-cheek sarcasm from sincerity. You might be trying to be funny; in which case please ignore this post. In case you're trying to be sincere:

Roger, Menace To Society claims explicitly to be an organization of griefers who would like to play the game as treacherous pirates. That's a reasonable style to play but claims affect the applicants that you get. As far as I can tell from my limited personal experience, Menace to Society includes at least some players who (due possibly to preferences for the pleasure of having gotten away with something forbidden) cannot be trusted to cooperate with others for mutual benefit.

Directly because of its policies, M2S will suffer ill-will from individuals who wish to play in an honorable or businesslike style. Until and unless those policies change, there cannot be a "wiping the slates clean".

Logkeeping - the ability to execute a trade in a trade window but also have the full details (who what when, possibly a memo field) logged in a (semi) publicly visible log. Simply a log of transactions visible from the Finance character's profile would be good, but associating each transaction to a logbook object that could be shown (not transferred) via corp mail, or duplicated and transferred via in-terminal trade would be even better - in order to keep different sets of records separate.

Currently, if one person, Fred, says they paid up in full, and another person, George, says that Fred didn't pay, then a third person cannot really distinguish who is lying (screenshots are something, but they could be faked with Photoshop, and videos are perhaps stronger, but annoying to use and transfer). The reason it's valuable to distinguish who is lying is so the third person can decide who to trust in the future, or to award a security deposit to the original depositor or the aggrieved party.

I like this idea, but I think completely excluding the material from alphas/other islands is too strong. Materials that have more deposits, larger deposits, higher regrowth rate, on one island than others can make different markets interestingly different, without going all the way to complete all-or-nothing exclusion.

The devs may have already done this. I don't know whether the materials and plants are evenly distributed among the islands. The in-game markets don't show much difference, at least - which means that either the materials are fairly evenly distributed, or we have sufficient freighting to smooth out the differences. Certainly the different kinds of kernels are different goods, and the PVE is not evenly distributed at all. Assignment-reward ammo is another good that has uneven distribution.

It is entirely possible to be a combat + research/prototyper combination. It just will be a fairly long time of doing combat to get kernels, and researching a fraction of them, selling a fraction of them, and using the money to buy ammo, always feeling "poor", before you have enough research% that you can buy refined commodities and prototype something (a non-standard item, so not ammo) that you can sell to a manufacturer.

If you want to be a reverser/manufacturer who is not also a researcher/prototyper, then you probably will need cooperate with a researcher/prototyper (since the open markets for prototypes are not very liquid) or limit yourself to reversing and manufacturing standard items, obtained from the market or drops.

Possibly the devs thought you needed encouragement to put a weapon, energy transferrer, or remote repper on your miner to help your guards out a bit in skilled mining? I don't know what the devs were thinking, but they were thinking something.

Baldy, you suggested limit orders would decrease the bid/ask spread? Why do you think so?

I was under the impression a limit order simply acted as a "execute at market price" buy or sell, moving through the order book until it has shifted the price to its limit, at which point it becomes an ordinary buy or sell order at the limit price.

We can do that now by a pair of a buy followed by a buy order, or a sell followed by a sell order; I don't see how adding a special-purpose mechanism would tighten the bid/ask spread.

Though you COULD use the "publicly announce that a payout has occurred, then owners display certificates to get their share of the payout" mechanism I describe above, it would be unpleasant enough that I think nobody would in fact use it.

Two similar ideas and one slightly different one.
1. Cash flow devices. A financial expert can create a "brand" or "printing press" object, labeling it at creation with a small amount of text, signed with the creators identity and possibly (with the correct role) their corporation's identity. From the brand object they can manufacture certificate objects (document objects labeled according to the brand). They can then trade the certificate objects to anyone, and later pay NIC into the brand object, and have it (divided according to the number of certificate objects) arrive in the accounts of the owners of the certificates.

This would greatly simplify administering corporate stock. It would also allow easy administration of various kinds of insurance securities, such as outpost encumbency securities ("pays 100k NIC if RG owns Karapyth at noon on 2211-12-31"), which could be used for insurance or mercenary purposes. Of course, there's still a trust issue - the label says it pays out at such and such a rate but will Artem Blue actually pay out that much?

2. Document flow devices. Just like the cash flow, the financial expert creates a "brand" object containing a short bit of text and their signature, then uses it to manufacture certificates identified with that text and signature, trades the certificates and then feeds stacks of (identical) documents into the brand object to distribute them (divided) to the owners of the certificates.

This would allow for a combinatorically large number of complex financial arrangements. For example, an outpost encumbency security that pays out in corporate scrip or shares.

3. If you have a message in the real world, you can (using XOR and parity) divide it into (for example) 5 chunks, any 3 of which are sufficient to recreate the original document. Another finance verb would allow dividing any object (or if that's too strong, any document) into 5 "quantum" fragments, any 3 of which are sufficient to recreate the original. This is a technique for more-secure freighting. The fragments would each have the same volume as the original, so you have to pay additional hauling fees (plus any cost of the dividing process), but pirates can't steal or destroy your object as easily. On the other hand, it's not a perfect defense, they could still steal a majority of the fragments and put it back together.

This would allow for lower value-density cargo which would lower the stakes of the pvp freight game, making it easier for newbie (uncapitalized) haulers to get into it. It would also create more traffic in general, which should make pirates happy - they get less per target, but more targets (less waiting, more chasing, more fun), and making a special effort to collect a particular "set" is fun.

The way to keep other people from undercutting you is to offer a price that is actually difficult for them to undercut. Yes, this means you get less than monopolistic profits. That's the consequence of competition.

JSands, if the "average price" is a moving average of prices of trades that were actually executed, a factor of 5 too high would be consistent with a falling price - and many things have been falling in price, as the economy boots up.

What I meant by "explicit" is that they have a particular public, advertised image. I know that the image is not the same as actions. I agree that ECORP and HUN are active, interesting corps - that's why I mentioned them at all - but they do not have as colorful public identities; the post was an attempt to get them to step up.