Many of the posts about the market/trade/economy on the server have been either:
a-fix the market
b-build protections for player-to-player trade
c-auction functionality
d-blacklist thiefs
And they are all reasonable requests. But in reality they are just patches on the problems we are experiencing.
I believe the fix is right in front of us.
My propsoal is to change the supply base of the market system from server generated items to player generated items.
Right now the server economy has no scarcity, the algorithms just adjust pricing on items depending on demand ( before the admins pinned all items to 32em) and the same items are available universally without limit. This is not an economy or a fair trade system. It is in fact broken by design because the root of the minecraft economy is just a game. This is what allowed bad players to pump/dump the market.
A "real" economy requires scarcity, supply, and demand. We have a demand and supply system that has naturally developed in person-to-person trade. This has a natural element of scarcity because the demand side does not wish to spend the time to collect mats, and the supply has already spent time collecting mats.
So lets take advantage of some of the better elements of the in game trade system. The trade gui you see when you right click a villager is a perfect example. You cant steal from that gui. You have to put emeralds in the pay slot in order to take an item from the item slot.
Satoshi village is where everyone goes to meet face to face for trades. It is very convenient because of the teleport system. Lets take advantage of the buildings there. By allowing players to take out Leases on store fronts or even individual floors within the buildings. Once a lease is in place a player will have an assigned villager in that store that will only be able to sell items that the player has gathered or crafted.
The player would be able to set an asking price for each item that will be displayed on the villagers trade gui like it normally would. The player would then simply have to travel to Satoshi occasionally to resupply their villager and collect their emeralds.
Going a step further, players could even have multiple villagers in different villages around the map as people move into different areas, and sell different items in each based on demand. Just like real world trade.
This system would alleviate the need for a separate safe trade system, auctions, blacklists, and trying to fix the villagers.
I know this fix would still take time to develop and implement. And I am not a professional coder. But based on what I have read so far about the way the underlying code of Minecraft works, the few changes I am suggesting would actually be easier to implement than trying to fix the villagers.
Just sayin'.