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Comment by nradov | Hacker News Reader

What's the point? I can already get a mortgage refinance or Heloc super easy if I want to. Where are the additional features?

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I often ask questions like this, and the most popular non-answers are, 1) think of the possibilities, 2) this technology is just getting started, so you can't judge it yet, and 3) unverifiable stories about some use case that is at best extremely narrow and may well be hogwash.

And when stating the imagined gains, the costs are always assumed to be zero. We know not to trust our data to a version 0.3 app, but somehow that's a fine thing to do with one's house or life savings.

It seems to be hype and speculation in its purest form. Pure as in having no actual utility. Reminds me of things like high frequency trading. Just expensive computation that extracts value and distracts people. With the difference that high frequency trading is less inherently dumb and feels more like an exploit rather than a scheme.

In fact, the profits of high frequency trading can be seen as rewards for filling the market with liquidity, so it's not strictly an exploit.

Is there much evidence that HFT yields in better results for those making economically meaningful trades? A theoretical increase in liquidity may not matter in already liquid markets, and if it does, it's not clear to me that the end-user gains are enough to justify the negative effects.

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