On a serious note....
> Engineers at Sydney-based Metamako LP and Exablaze Pty. Ltd., and Chicago-based xCelor LLC are rolling out switches that take around four nanoseconds—four billionths of a second—for messages to transit from one side to the other, sending data from exchanges to electronic traders.
Wow, can anyone shed some light on how they time this? What sort of clock, I'm assuming its some fancy hardware that you use to benchmark at the 4 nano second level? Or do you just claim this and assume that no one can prove you wrong?
As to Bitfinex, on the weekend a few friends and I were batting around ideas on how to reliably trade bitcoins without having to worry about being robbed by the exchange^H^H^H^H^H err worrying about the exchange being hacked and passing their mistake onto you.
The top ideas we had were:
- only trade on US domiciled exchanges, the US government tends to poke their nose into everything and this is one case where you benefit.
- phone the exchange before you start trading. If you can't get someone on the phone, that's a very bad sign:)
- Similarly, if the C level executives of the exchange aren't well known and always around at the regular bitcoin industry conferences then that's a bad, though this fails the Mt Gox test.
- we tried to figure out if you could pull the coins out each night and put them back in each day, but even then, you'd run the risk of the hack happening while you had coins held by the exchange.
But we came to the conclusion that there just isn't any sane way to trade bitcoins currently where you can eliminate "exchange risk". If anyone does know of a way please let me know.