Live data from Hacker News

Flash Boys 2: Frontrunning, transaction reordering, consensus instability (2019)

arxiv.org

41–50 of 54 posts

Re: Flash Boys 2: Frontrunning, transaction reordering, consensus instability (2019)

#41
post #40

I tell people who are interested in the crypto market: just look at the structures and concepts that exist in "centralized finance" and replicate them for the crypto world. (Eg: risk systems, custodial systems, index calculators, portfolio management, the list goes on, etc... ) This 2019 paper simply re-confirms that thought. Crypto today is no different than the 1900 turn-of-the-century bucket-shop pump-and-dump sca…

[deleted]

Re: Flash Boys 2: Frontrunning, transaction reordering, consensus instability (2019)

#42
post #40

I tell people who are interested in the crypto market: just look at the structures and concepts that exist in "centralized finance" and replicate them for the crypto world. (Eg: risk systems, custodial systems, index calculators, portfolio management, the list goes on, etc... ) This 2019 paper simply re-confirms that thought. Crypto today is no different than the 1900 turn-of-the-century bucket-shop pump-and-dump sca…

Crypto has unique qualities that enable new applications.

For example, you can issue loans to yourself using MakerDAO:

https://oasis.app/borrow

The process is permissionless, meaning, among other things, that it can be automated, and it carries almost zero fees (only the Ethereum gas fee for EVM instructions).

To take another example, the world's leading decentralized exchange, Uniswap, has now overtaken centralized exchanges in market depth for some major trading pairs:

https://uniswap.org/blog/uniswap-v3-dominance

This is a credibly neutral value exchange protocol that major centralized exchanges are coalescing around as a source of liquidity. The market depth is truly impressive. For example, you can sell hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of ETH in one trade with almost zero slippage.

So crypto is not just another iteration of Wall Street.

And to the point of past iterations of Wall Street: the 19th century banking system was not rife with scams as the caricature suggests:

https://www.cato.org/blog/fable-cats

Re: Flash Boys 2: Frontrunning, transaction reordering, consensus instability (2019)

#43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure what numbers you compared, but quick research on market cap [1,2]: European market cap 2019: 8,078,748,800,000 (8 trn) Coinmarketcap today: 1,583,350,504,806 (1 trn) Not a tiny blip. Compared to world equity 2021 [3]: 117 trn I would call it a small blip. 1: https://tradingeconomics.com/european-union/market-capitaliz... 2: https://coinmarketcap.com/ 3: https://www.sifma.org/resources/research/research-quart…

I meant volumes traded. European equities are 50 billion per day, crypto is 100.

A lot of it is wash trading though and a lot of the market cap is paper gains too.

I still think it should be regulated and we would be better without the crypto market, but I doubt a crypto crash would have much of an impact on the economy in general.

Re: Flash Boys 2: Frontrunning, transaction reordering, consensus instability (2019)

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I respectfully don't think it is too harsh. Every legal definition I know of frontrunning requires a client relationship. Even in the case of "non-public" information, frontrunning refers to trading ahead of your client based on non-public information related to the clients securities. Trading on non-public information when a client is not involved is referred to as insider trading. Also in this context, the reason t…

Not sure why you are so hung up on the semantics. Obviously the "legal definition" of frontrunning is different from the crypto native definition. What matters is that it adeptly captures the nature of these actions.

Um, because I think words have meaning, and I think accusing people of actions that have legal implications when they are not in fact doing those things is bad.

Re: Flash Boys 2: Frontrunning, transaction reordering, consensus instability (2019)

#45
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone calls it MEV because of this very paper. They coined the term. You did answer your own question in (3).

And MEV is reordering of EVM, which totally makes sense.

Not really, given that MEV is by no means isolated to EVM.

Re: Flash Boys 2: Frontrunning, transaction reordering, consensus instability (2019)

#46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure why you are so hung up on the semantics. Obviously the "legal definition" of frontrunning is different from the crypto native definition. What matters is that it adeptly captures the nature of these actions.

Um, because I think words have meaning, and I think accusing people of actions that have legal implications when they are not in fact doing those things is bad.

Hope you've never killed anyone in a video game, wouldn't want the po-po coming for you. Think of the legal implications!

Words have meaning relative to their context.

Re: Flash Boys 2: Frontrunning, transaction reordering, consensus instability (2019)

#47
post #40

I tell people who are interested in the crypto market: just look at the structures and concepts that exist in "centralized finance" and replicate them for the crypto world. (Eg: risk systems, custodial systems, index calculators, portfolio management, the list goes on, etc... ) This 2019 paper simply re-confirms that thought. Crypto today is no different than the 1900 turn-of-the-century bucket-shop pump-and-dump sca…

Please tell me where in the world of centralized finance I can go to take out a zero-collateral multi-million dollar loan, transact with it, and immediately pay it back?

Re: Flash Boys 2: Frontrunning, transaction reordering, consensus instability (2019)

#48
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In past few years, I got calls with offer to build artificial market making models (aka pump and dump) for crypto exchanges, with 7 figures payout per model + commission, I refuse to do such work, this is just disgusting, don't care how legal or illegal this is, it did not seem they have infrastructure for HFT in terms of Order Routing like it is on stock exchanges like BATS etc ...

Is it any more disgusting than people speculating in crypto, but lying to themselves and calling it an "investing?"

Heh, you're falling into the same trap: "speculation" is just a five-dollar word for "gambling".

Re: Flash Boys 2: Frontrunning, transaction reordering, consensus instability (2019)

#49
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that is mostly printed money. You can't take the crypto market cap seriously. If a significant portion of it tries to get converted from "magic internet money" to real money the price will plummet.

You realise that applies to “real money” too right?

Stock has some intrinsic value though. When we talk about Europe - the stockmarket is not so inflated: mostly boring companoes doing boring stuff -> that brings a lot of cash flow.

Re: Flash Boys 2: Frontrunning, transaction reordering, consensus instability (2019)

#50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I meant volumes traded. European equities are 50 billion per day, crypto is 100.

A lot of it is wash trading though and a lot of the market cap is paper gains too. I still think it should be regulated and we would be better without the crypto market, but I doubt a crypto crash would have much of an impact on the economy in general.

It's quite unlikely that more than half the trades would be wash trading.

It's very liquid because it's much more accessible to non-professionals. Giving retail flow direct access is where the revolution lies.

Post reply on HN