"There is no single obviously correct solution to these issues. Instead, each decision was sort of weird and contingent and reversible: not the immutable code of the blockchain, but just humans sitting around and trying to figure out which approach would cause the fewest complaints. In that, it's a bit like the Dole settlement process -- only instead of a neutral judge making decisions based on written contracts and…
That's why I think our current cryptocurrencies will just get destroyed by government centralized (that is, no block-chain) crypto-money attached to each of their currencies.
There are plenty of people that have legitimate concerns about HFT or rather the mechanics they promote (frontrunning trades in particular).
HFT doesn't front run trades, that's a misconception and really just a way to slander HFT as evil. Calling their misconceptions legitimate is an abuse of language. Front-running is a crime, it has an actual meaning and you are misusing the term. Front-running is when a broker buys or sells using advanced knowledge of trades they're making on behalf of their clients, i.e. it is risk free and is theft. HFT does not fro…
Then call it what you want. It's running in front of other trades just that you do it on arbitrary trades and not the ones of your customer.
HFT doesn't front run trades, that's a misconception and really just a way to slander HFT as evil. Calling their misconceptions legitimate is an abuse of language. Front-running is a crime, it has an actual meaning and you are misusing the term. Front-running is when a broker buys or sells using advanced knowledge of trades they're making on behalf of their clients, i.e. it is risk free and is theft. HFT does not fro…
Then call it what you want. It's running in front of other trades just that you do it on arbitrary trades and not the ones of your customer.
No, front running is risk free because it uses inside information, that's why it's illegal. Trying to trade faster than someone else is not risk free, requires guessing, is gambling, and is not illegal, and is thus not front running. What you're claiming is simply wrong. So please do explain why you think HFT is doing something wrong. It doesn't matter what we call it, you're claiming HFT is doing something they are not doing, they are making educated guesses and trading on that guess, same as any other legitimate trader.
> it's more like a company cloning itself but adopting a different vision/mission, and awarding shares to all existing shareholders. And that doesn't sound... insane to you? I mean, skipping the problems with physics where a "split" company would have to clone its employee talent pool as well: such a company would share the same products and the same markets and the same sales channels and have zero share of all of t…
It's no different than all the third world countries inventing phantom cash every time they trot out a new currency because the old one suffered astronomical inflation. All money is funny money. The US government regularly invents phantom cash out of thin air in order to maintain the desired 3% annual inflation. That's hundreds of billions of dollars every year that just poof into existence. I'm basically with you th…
Some of us remember way back when the crypto dorks were claiming that bitcoin would be the first unfunny money :)
Then call it what you want. It's running in front of other trades just that you do it on arbitrary trades and not the ones of your customer.
No, front running is risk free because it uses inside information, that's why it's illegal. Trying to trade faster than someone else is not risk free, requires guessing, is gambling, and is not illegal, and is thus not front running. What you're claiming is simply wrong. So please do explain why you think HFT is doing something wrong. It doesn't matter what we call it, you're claiming HFT is doing something they are…
There is no risk involved in HFT frontrunning. There is however an investment cost for having lower latency connections than others. There are no guesses. And not sure how what I'm claiming is wrong. This has been the entire reason why IEX exists.
> I'd say you don't really understand what you're critiquing I'd say that you are assuming that optimizing for price is good, and presupposing how a market should be judged. Cheaper is good when it represents new innovation, less energy waste, and similar improvements. Cheaper can also mean cuts to wages and jobs, or a reduction in quality. > There's absolutely nothing wrong with short selling Leverage can be used fo…
"Leverage can be used for good, and sometimes it's used irresponsibly. As this thread's article demonstrates, short selling also creates systemic risk." What critics of short selling are often unaware of is the role that short holdings play in dampening a market crash. The act of unwinding your short position involves buying the stock which means that for every tick downward in stock price there is new upward pressur…
I should have used more specific language; I'm not trying to argue that short selling is "bad". The benefits - such as dampening a crashing market - are large enough to accommodate some risk. I'm primarily addressing the claim that, "There's absolutely nothing wrong with short selling". Ignoring small, acceptable risks is normalizing deviance[1].
> But BTC hasn't really lost any value since the spinoff, still trading at about $2,700. So just before the spinoff, if you had a bitcoin, you had a bitcoin worth about $2,700. Now, you have a BTC worth about $2,700, and also a BCH worth as much as $700. It's weird free money, if you owned bitcoins yesterday. Doesn't this throw up any red-flags to the btc/crypto apologist? This type of behavior is not how healthy mar…
There is at least one viable theory that says that by removing the risk of an "even bigger problem" (malicious rollbacks and double spends caused by warring miners battling over a single chain, etc), and by allowing all camps to pursue their vision in relative peace, the BCH fork has legitimately increased the value of the Bitcoin* ecosystem. Perhaps a case of the baby being worth more now that it's been successfully cut in half.
I find it stupid. People were warned two weeks in advance that they will be given less than 1 BCH per BTC. People had two weeks to withdraw their BTC in order to get 1:1 during the fork.
Finex may have played this badly, but it was clearly stated in their statement on how they were handling the fork. If you didn't like their approach, all you had to do was move your coins off the exchange and split them yourself. It wasn't (too) difficult to do, and I say that as someone who isn't really technical, but can follow simple instructions.