> "One proposed method of stopping incidents like the Knightmare, and generally to limit HFT from wading too far into ethically grey areas, is by leveraging blockchain tech. For example, front-running—sneaking in trades a few microseconds early based on advance knowledge of pending changes to the market—could be stymied if the market adopted a slightly slower, transactional, blockchain-style ledger."
Adding another layer does not stymie anything - it might add latency but this will be exploited by those with the most resources resulting in [additional] advantages (e.g. on top of the microwave network advantage, a race to write to the blockchain).
To answer the question "why use your own microwave network?" the author provides 2 reasons:
> The first reason is somewhat obvious; if you have your own network connection, it's usually easier to guarantee things like security, quality of service, bandwidth, and other factors that businesses value highly. The second reason, as we've already alluded to, is that microwave networks—somewhat surprisingly—can have lower latency than fibre. With some advanced networks, that latency is only a few microseconds slower than the speed of light. Fibre can be pretty quick over short stretches, but it soon starts lagging over longer distances, such as between two stock exchanges or a multinational's offices.
The 1st reason is really off the mark. We know how to securely transmit data over insecure networks, and quality of service and bandwidth can be better handled by service contracts with the network provider. He states "other factors that businesses value highly" which is vague but could possibly be interpreted to include competitive advantages - yet cannot in light of the fact that the 2nd point addresses competitive advantages. By owning the fastest microwave network, you can execute faster than your competitors and directly use that for monetary advantage. So his 1st reason is completely waste of space.
Since when is having an opinion a bad thing? If we all delayed putting out theories (like Good to Great does in explaining commonalities of companies that made it huge) until all existing theories like Survivorship Bias were covered then no new theories put out.
Survivorship Bias has a place but it is not the be-all-end-all.
and moves and copies won't have potential for other memory management bugs? You'll still have memory management overhead and now additional complexity.
do you really need coroutines for cert decoding and handling of handshake messages? It's not like you can parallelize these things and do something else in the meantime...
Given various clues such as:
-"OS-less"
-small memory footprint
-going out of their way to include discussion of legal jurisdictions
-the author and past activities
-performance seems not a major concern
Makes me suspect that a major goal is anonymity. It's less aimed at users installing on their non-anonymous Windows/Mac/phone but rather leverage generic/commodity hardware to communicate over SSL. Throwaway burner phones.
some bad advice here based on bad assumption. You assume and suggest that going with another "modern stack" is somehow going to be worth the extra effort. Re-inventing the wheel is a recipe for wasting time and effort that can be better spent elsewhere - like on building and driving the community.
given the years of covert actions slowly coming to light, this is changing. I'm not just talking about relationships with 3-letter agencies but also actions like colluding to push down developer salaries, black-boxing their search algorithms, suddenly blacklisting competitors in their search rankings (e.g. Rap Genius), WiFi and Streeview privacy invasion, etc... How many times have they already faced Antitrust accusations?
Add to that the fact that Google is THE face of the recent tech backlash. Others don't like the whole idea that they employ a tiny fraction of someone like GM yet "hoovering up public subsidies and then avoiding taxes"[1]. If the public backlash continues or increases, we'll all start to face (some) repercussions - so how long will the tech community support Google en masse?
Adding another layer does not stymie anything - it might add latency but this will be exploited by those with the most resources resulting in [additional] advantages (e.g. on top of the microwave network advantage, a race to write to the blockchain).