it is right at the intersection of things you are more familiar with in tech:
aggregating user data and selling it.
people with dis-equal access to service and collecting everyone else's orders midstream and selling it:
the machine two racks away from the matching engine is selling information to the machine one rack away from the matching engine
and this goes all the way out to your broker, your etrade or robinhood who is selling all of your profile and trade data to the machine two racks away from the matching engine
it adds a lot of value for a lot of people. the actual femtosecond trade isn't what anybody cares about.
regarding the equality, it wasn't that long ago where you had dis-equal access if you couldn't physically be at the stock exchange, in fact thats where you were supposed to be if you wanted to trade. so I can't buy that argument, in isolation.
I do think it is a form of front-running, which is regulated in some capacity but very specifically worded such that your broker can't place a trade before you just because they found out you wanted to. what we have here is front-running but from different unrelated companies in the chain and all automated by machine.
Yes, good analysis. Whats the goodput (the net social benefit) and whats the badput?
Do I (for instance) pay more? I suspect I do. I suspect the intermediary sniping in, forces prices up to their advantage. The dis-equality is being abused, to extract rent from me because I am slow. HURRY UP! Bidness waiting.
Which means, overall, we all pay more. This is cost shifting to make money, by snatching goods in flight, and charging a minim to pass them on. The intermediary has no intention of doing anything except profiting. they aren't holding, they aren't helping.
I'm not a free market person btw. So, I'd probably say that about a lot of behaviour in 'the market'
I suspect that I (as an individual investor in my retirement account and personal investments, not as an HFT) pay less.
My mental model is that pre-HFT, banks and other market makers made a lot more money per share traded. HFT outcompeted them and the HFTs make less money per share. I, as an individual investor, get to keep more of my money and less of it goes to various intermediaries.
-you pay less for an order
-it takes less time for your order to get filled
-more efficient pricing
-liquidity ripples out into risk management products derived from thick order books
-easier to manage risk
-lower cost of transaction
"badput"
-hard to compete against the liquidity providers
-they have unparalleled view of order flow, which runs counter to a market with fair equal access to information
its why people choose ICOs: immediate liquidity with the biggest "controversy" being that VCs get to buy at a lower price.
this is distinct from a decade+ long private equity drama, only to find out that you, all employees and even the founders get nothing from the exit event. This is where getting to the exit is wrought with landmines, just to find out your particular exit is horrible but a fairly standard affair.
now that there is competition lets talk about what we can do to make both markets better
I've watched Indian movies that were controversial in India or some Indian states, and I can see how the western audience or curator could totally not understand what an Indian audience would agree with.
There was one Indian movie from 2004 that was controversial because it featured a lesbian couple. The movie had the typical bollywood love triangle, except the guy was ANGRY that the beautiful woman wanted to see another beautiful woman, along with seeing him. He expressed his anger and was trying to break up this "unholy arrangement" and correct the one woman into loving a man, and exclusively.
I'm more used to men expending all of their energy trying to get into situations with two beautiful women, and then accepting the improbability of two equally attractive and bi-sexual women existing.
So this movie was pure comedy to me, as well as the Indian state's extreme response. Just india things.
It is hard to understand the ideological assumptions of that pervasively conservative but kinda-wannabe-westernized society.
Payments with Monero use would have solved and prevented the donor data from being leaked.
I'm still a little distressed at how few web-anything providers accept Monero.
Privacy focused email services and cloud service providers should be using it
but what we really have is protonmail only accepting credit cards and nobody seems to see the irony in that.
occassionally in the past I have found email and cloud service providers accepting Bitcoin, and I shapeshifted Monero over TOR to pay for the invoice. Nobody knows who I am and they received the bitcoin they were looking for.
But that was YEARS ago, 2015? 2016? Seems the possibilities have gotten worse for now
As always with great (/s) solutions proposed on HN, it's neither simple, nor are there any great incentives for providers or is there consumer demand. The average protonmail user doesn't care and/or know why using a credit card could be a problem.
That I find hard to believe. Maybe the average Internet user is clueless about that. But the average ProtonMail user?
I was shocked when I saw that. It's a total disconnect. Why not Bitcoin? All decent VPN services accept Bitcoin. ScryptMail accepts Bitcoin. Even VFEmail does.
Even worse, if you create a ProtonMail account via Tor, you can't use even the free tier unless you provide card and number numbers. That's worse than even Facebook!
> The average protonmail user doesn't care and/or know why using a credit card could be a problem.
Right, which is hilarious.
> As always with great (/s) solutions proposed on HN
Using an opportunity to patronize without understanding my perspective at all. Interesting... (cont.)
> it's neither simple, nor are there any great incentives for providers or is there consumer demand.
Despite not knowing or caring that I would agree with this.
Anyway! The landscape of cloud service providers always has providers that don't care about outsized consumer demand. Therefore this seems to be more of an educational issue as well as an assertiveness issue distinct from one related to the practicality of running a cloud service.
I'm using protonmail via CC, don't see the problem tbh.
Security and privacy aren't binary options, it's a multi-dimensional spectrum where the optimal point depends on your threat model, budget and other factors. For me, it's not relevant if the police finds out if I use protonmail.
Not sure about monero specifically but it's not so easy to find a crypto payment provider for more 'critical' services. And hand rolling one is not exactly a option for anyone.
I used to pursue highly compensated careers, and now I don't rely on a paycheck. I occasionally pursue some high value commission deals just because I have the network for it, and this can top up my accounts whenever.
I travel a lot and go to a lot of coveted events: it isn't that expensive.
If you already had a highly compensated career (low six figures, high 5 figures in a no-income-tax state), your biggest issue was time.
Stock market fluctuations cost more than going out. Being on the wrong side of the market costs more than the last minute flight to the other side of the world in the middle of summer.
What do you think your friends really did that you abstained from? I'm sure you have a couple of observations, but I think the real conclusion is that you missed out. Quitting work and raising a child is a coveted outcome, for some, but I don't think you know if your colleagues have stunted wealth just because they did things more fulfilling to them.
