Intruder at the top of the 20 meter amateur band? • Hacker News Board

Re: Intruder at the top of the 20 meter amateur band?

#181

Post by KirillPanov » Tue, Jan 12, 2021, 11:50 PM UTC

tlrobinson wrote: post #165

KirillPanov wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At HF bitrates they can use a one-time pad. The only unbreakable cipher. A single hard drive shipped (or hand-delivered) to each transmitter location ought to last a decade.

No need to ship a hard drive, just send it over the regular internet. It would be an interesting exercise to design an encryption and compression protocol that has a high bandwidth/high latency link and a low bandwidth/low latency link working together.

> No need to ship a hard drive, just send it over the regular internet.

Well, then it isn't an unbreakable cipher anymore.

It's only as strong as whatever encryption you used to transmit the pad over the clearnet. If you were using a one-time pad to do that then you used up the pad in the process, so you could've just told the reciever to transfer the pad from their internet-decryptor to their HF-radio decryptor.

Re: Intruder at the top of the 20 meter amateur band?

#182

Post by cma » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 6:08 AM UTC

giantrobot wrote: post #102

cma wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saving one microsecond is rewarded the same as saving one millisecond, as long as you beat out the next best guy. There are vast diminishing returns to society but the winner is still rewarded the same so incentivized to make it faster and faster, ultimately burning away energy and misallocating capital until the reward is exhausted, and then repeating each time a new generation of hardware is out.

Not quite, you're forgetting the T in HFT. If everyone was just buying securities a microsecond vs a millisecond might not matter much. What happens is a lot of HFTs act as market makers. They arbitrage positions they create which screws over any non-HFTs. It also moves the price of securities for no reason which affects everyone holding that security. There's also been plenty of cases of HFTs doing front-running and…

I should clarify I'm referring to pure latency arbitrage stuff and not all HFT.

Re: Intruder at the top of the 20 meter amateur band?

#183

Post by kasey_junk » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 5:05 PM UTC

jandrese wrote: post #179

kasey_junk wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my previous example if the highest sell price is $9.99 and you offer to buy at 9.98 you are “offering liquidity”. It’s not a service that’s on offer it’s a fundamental market behavior that any participant can engage in.

Right, which is what I was talking about in the original post. You don't need ultra-low latency to put in that $9.98 order to keep the market moving. If you were serious about providing liquidity you'd have tons of bids and offers open all the time. You would be holding tons of stock at the end of the day by the nature of the business. HFT firms tell you that they are making life easier for traditional investors by p…

My entire point is you are not accurately describing how they operate.

Re: Intruder at the top of the 20 meter amateur band?

#184

Post by kortilla » Fri, Jan 15, 2021, 8:32 PM UTC

matthewdgreen wrote: post #110

kortilla wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First look is still not front running. Unless you are able to get your order in before other orders, it’s not front running. Get it? Being the first to look at new orders is nice, but the orders are in the queue so there is no way to get in front of them. Here is a link to help you: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/frontrunning.asp It’s very well-defined in the industry and when you complain about something compl…

Again, this is exactly the behavior I mentioned in the above post. When the general public raises the important question of how much extractive behavior there is in HFT and asks whether the benefits outweigh the value lost by disadvantaged parties, they get brushed off and told that they’re ignorant. Your response focuses on one specific technical allegation while casually admitting that yeah, maybe there’s another t…

It’s simple though, stop claiming people are breaking the law (front-running) if you want to have a productive discussion. It’s not a “technical detail”, it’s a fundamental property of not being able to beat an order that made it to the exchange before yours.

The reason your concerns are brushed off is because they are nonsensical to anyone who actually understands the market. You’re complaining about extractive behavior but are unable to articulate how it is actually happening and calling it “front running” shows that you definitely have no idea how HFT is making money.

Describe the steps by which you think having something like first look or just faster access to the exchanges allows HFTs to unfairly extract money from normal trades.

Re: Intruder at the top of the 20 meter amateur band?

#185

Post by matthewdgreen » Sat, Jan 16, 2021, 8:00 PM UTC

kortilla wrote: post #184

matthewdgreen wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, this is exactly the behavior I mentioned in the above post. When the general public raises the important question of how much extractive behavior there is in HFT and asks whether the benefits outweigh the value lost by disadvantaged parties, they get brushed off and told that they’re ignorant. Your response focuses on one specific technical allegation while casually admitting that yeah, maybe there’s another t…

It’s simple though, stop claiming people are breaking the law (front-running) if you want to have a productive discussion. It’s not a “technical detail”, it’s a fundamental property of not being able to beat an order that made it to the exchange before yours. The reason your concerns are brushed off is because they are nonsensical to anyone who actually understands the market. You’re complaining about extractive beha…

There’s an entire book by Michael Lewis that describes these steps. I don’t have enough knowledge to tell you how accurate his description is, and I’d be willing to hear a cogent argument in response. But if you agree that those activities are indeed happening and you’re simply claiming that the abuses he describes are not technically illegal or technically the SEC definition of “front running” then your point is noted and my response is: so what? That’s not a defense against the allegations.

Re: Intruder at the top of the 20 meter amateur band?

#186

Post by chordalkeyboard » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 7:59 AM UTC

erik_seaberg wrote: post #125

chordalkeyboard wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

its highly counterintuitive to see the modern system in the same terms as the capital markets of last millennium. and I'm convinced the system isn't perfect, I'm sure there are things that should be changed. I'm merely suggesting that the market sped up as people learned to do market stuff faster, and that market stuff is ultimately a process of allocating capital resources.

I haven’t seen any claims that HFT is allocating capital in better directions . They’re mostly reacting to the same signal and trying to trade the same asset at the same price, right? That’s the only case where the latency matters, because the market uses order time to break ties.

the market allocates better, the hot allocates faster. the information (prices) is better because its more current.

Re: Intruder at the top of the 20 meter amateur band?

#187

Post by kortilla » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 9:25 AM UTC

matthewdgreen wrote: post #185

kortilla wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s simple though, stop claiming people are breaking the law (front-running) if you want to have a productive discussion. It’s not a “technical detail”, it’s a fundamental property of not being able to beat an order that made it to the exchange before yours. The reason your concerns are brushed off is because they are nonsensical to anyone who actually understands the market. You’re complaining about extractive beha…

There’s an entire book by Michael Lewis that describes these steps. I don’t have enough knowledge to tell you how accurate his description is, and I’d be willing to hear a cogent argument in response. But if you agree that those activities are indeed happening and you’re simply claiming that the abuses he describes are not technically illegal or technically the SEC definition of “front running” then your point is not…

> There’s an entire book by Michael Lewis that describes these steps.

Yes, it was widely derided as a one-sided argument used to support a new exchange (i.e. it was glorified marketing material). It was an entertaining book, but it excluded any realistic view about how “the evil side” works in his narrative.

> then your point is noted and my response is: so what? That’s not a defense against the allegations.

The point is that there are no fucking allegations here. When someone comes out and says, “I don’t like HFTs because they front run orders,” and the reply is “that’s not front running”, what is left to defend? They are being accused of a crime they aren’t committing because people don’t know what the crime is.

It’s like claiming the 7-eleven extorted you into buying a hot dog because they offered a 2 for 1 sale. Then someone points out that isn’t extortion. Then you say “so what? That’s not a defense against the allegations.”

Let’s put this another way. There is a reason that no regulation or arrests came out of flash boys. When you actually look at what HFTs do, there is nothing “unfair” to regular market participants. If you put in an order to sell AAPL at $125, there is no way for them to get ahead of that order in the exchange.