1,000 karma · joined May 19, 2013
This issue is not about frequency per se at all. Its about who has access to what information at what price. For instance one thing that happened was that data providers (e.g. Reuters) sold information to a group of traders, before it was available to the public.
The question is not at all whether software should be used to trade (we're not going back to pen & paper / pit trading). Rather the question is how software should be used in financial markets. HFT is not evil, it's a difficult problem to be solved.
Several founders from Deepmind where his PhD students.
Not many startups go from 0$ to 1.65B$ in 22 months.
Jason did not mention that Google itself was not a real business for a very long time. Are there good writeups of how Google managed to crack the biggest jackpot in business history with AdSense? Sure this experience taught them the lesson which they applied here. In poker terms it's like a draw to the nuts.
There is this notion of a contract. In a democracy a valid contract is an agreement (say between 2 parties) which is enforceable by courts and executive. Enforceable means that there is a cost of cheating. Even the most simple purchase contains a purchase agreement. If Alice walks into Bob's store and takes something without paying, then this is what we call theft (although the precise details of theft can be argued about ad infinitum).
In the real world when we enter agreements, we usually know to some extent who we are dealing with (Alice knows Bob's store). What would an arbitrary agreement over a network look like? That's hard to say. An analogon of a court is some arbitrary human decision, which can serve as an input. In Bitcoin there is no notion of an agreement, only cash transactions (and some limited facilities for escrow).
I believe that the concept of an oracle, and several other crypto-terms like Zero-knowledge proofs are an academic dead end. For my purposes I'm assuming that most people who want to use crypto systems don't understand or care about these things. There will be a great need for mapping abstract concepts to useful tools, such as an GUI operating system maps very abstract physical calculations and processes and makes them usable. I suspect 99% of Bitcoin users don't understand public-key cryptography, much less Elliptic curves and distributed systems. "Key", "signature" and "coins" are useful metaphors.
What is already happening are the first beginnings of joint stock ownership developing (DAC's) with mixtures of online formal agreements and informal agreements. Voting is not a panacea, but it helps. That's the kind of contract that can be developed in the short term.
I suspect to make smart contracts work, one needs a different time-stamping/incentive system altogether (non-blockchain), but haven't seen any progress in that direction.
assets left = 7.5m$
expense = 4m$
trading losses = 6.5m
It's an insane amount of money to burn through, without releasing anything of utility so far. I had to deal with several people from that team and they are scammers. Idea itself is interesting, but not workable.
Blockchain based DNS systems already exist. Web search mostly builds on links and DNS. If one thinks about it TLD names are pretty much fixed, where as in Namecoin they are subject to consensus. What one can do, and that's one example out of many, is create unique hashes for any content to create indestructible information.
Post on alt.hypertext on 6/8/1991
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/alt.hypertext/eCTkkOoW...
NCSA X Mosaic 0.5 released, 23/1/1993
http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q1/0099.ht...
Unfortunately 2 years later, we're not much further in those developments. Bitcoin has severe limitations, also because it has now a legacy to support. New projects can start with a fresh design. So far we've only seen very few new approaches. While many Bitcoiners realize the imperfections of the system, very few actually think there could be something better.