raging bulls

Wed Aug 8 13:52:51 UTC 2012

It seems to me that all the markets have been doing this the wrong way.
Would it now be more fair to use some kind of signed timestamp and
process all transactions in the order that they originated?  Perhaps
each trade could have a signed GPS tag with the absolute time on it. It
would keep everyone's trades in order no matter how latent their
connection to the market was.  All you would have to do is introduce a
couple of seconds delay to account for the longest circuit and then take
them in order.  They could certainly use less expensive connections and
ensure that international traders get a fair shake.

Steven Naslund

-----Original Message-----
From: Eugen Leitl [mailto:eugen at leitl.org] 
Sent: Wednesday, August 08, 2012 2:02 AM
To: nanog at nanog.org
Subject: Re: raging bulls

On Tue, Aug 07, 2012 at 05:15:51PM -1000, Michael Painter wrote:
> Eugen Leitl wrote:
>> http://www.wired.com/business/2012/08/ff_wallstreet_trading/all/
>>
>> Some interesting, network-relevant content there (but for the 
>> neutrino and drone rubbish).
>
> 'Rubbish' might be a pretty strong word when you're talking about the
players in this space.

If you want to shave off ms, using a source that takes at least minutes
to accrue enough signal for a single bit is definitely not what you
want. And drones across the Atlantic is way too Rube Goldbergesque to
contemplate.

> My favorite from the article:
> "But perhaps not even Einstein fully appreciated the degree to which 
> electromagnetic waves bend in the presence of money. "

Maybe they should invest into a dense, a really low LEO sat
constellation, and go by way of LoS laser.