Wow that's a really impressive and well put together demo and overview. Really easy to follow and I'm glad I went through the whole tour. Question - you mentioned optimizations but I didn't see that in the tour. How would that work?
Loved the history. Don't imagine that traders will ever stop trying to get an advantage. I find it fascinating that even the postmaster thought an informational edge was unfair. Important to remember that those with a speed edge, even today, end up quickly converging the markets, and eliminating their own opportunity away.
Also there is a clear distinction between a speed edge and outright illegal acts. Cutting telegraph wires reminds me of modern day equivalents... ie. Enron calling generation plant operators to shut down.
To be clear, the price of energy goes negative because of government subsidies. For example, a wind plant with a $30/MWH subsidy can afford to run at a price of -$30.
Similarly, if you're in California and you ever wondered why your electricity bill is 2x that of any other state, it is because you are the ones footing the bill for those subsidies. Without subsidies, wind and solar are far more inefficient at a $/MWH basis.
This is one of the the few cases where Clayton Christenson's insights on disruption apply. Insieme was founded on the premise of trying to disrupt Cisco's existing business because Cisco cannot effectively do so from within.
While I was reading about the daily emails, I couldn't help but think that the slow web was just marketing speak for their chosen technical infrastructure. Ie. they run a midnight CRON job that parses all the emails because that's easy/cheap.
This warmed my heart. And thinking about it from a business perspective, not everybody needs to own their own self-driving car. Ie. it can self-drive itself home for use by the next person. Which means economically, the car price can be many multiples of the cost of current cars (imagine a $100k car that is shared between five families rather than five families each with their own car).
I've seen this argument in many forms. It generally goes: Robots will never be able to do [insert activity here] as well as humans for [insert reason here].
I rather think that this robot is a fantastic v0.01 in what could be the beginning of many hundreds of versions. Some of these future versions will have features that are better than what human bartenders can do, yet, many future versions will still be inferior.
I hate hate hate D&B. so scammy and spammy and worthless. I think their corporate structure reflects the scam... One company issues the DUNS # but another is the telemarketing spammy one that calls you for years afterward.