On 20/07/11 8:02 AM, Sampo Syreeni wrote:
On 2011-07-20, Ian G wrote:
To answer OP, typically all trading is done on a delayed and netted
settlement. Which is to say the trade might be done real time but the
settlement is batched for later, typically after market closing. No
money changes hands until later. This is especially true as you get
closer to liquidity or speculative trading, because of the nature of
the parties having no skin in the game, and trading on credit.
Yes, and I should have touched this as well. The problem is, the biggest
thing driving Bitcoin adoption is that it cuts down on the middlemen,
and their cost. Government involvement, of course, but also the
financial establishment. If you then have to rely on trusted third
parties/marketplaces/settlement agency, even with Bitcoin, that
nullifies half of the promise the currency has in the first place.
Yes, sure, but:
1. we are talking about high frequency trading here, and speed is the
first, second and third rule. Each trade could be making 10k++ and up,
which buys you a lot of leaches.
Basically, you have to get the trade down to the cost of a packet, delay
and two secret key ops. Indeed, if you can measure the delay of the
secret key op, we might be encouraged to pre-calculate shared PRNG
streams so as to speed up the encrypt/decrypt cycle. (Gee I wonder if I
should file a patent on that idea :P )
This and other aspects of high frequency trading forces a credit
exposure to the trades, which requires someone to step in and control
that credit. No payments allowed to interfere with the trade itself.
In the financial cryptography exchange for real time trading that I
built, payments were delivered up-front, but there was intra-order
trading that was done on credit by the central exchange. That is, a
sell order of 100 could be fulfilled 10 at a time until closed out.
This was necessary to improve the liquidity, and as liquidity makes the
trade happen or not in many cases, it dominated the question of credit
and associated leaching costs.
If we're talking anything else like retail payments, then there is
leeway to insist on pure BitCoin settlement at its speed.
2. The payoff to the stationary bandit also closes the loop on the
criminals you peer with. In BitCoin, there is no such closure, you
don't get to select your criminal partners. This raises your costs.
I also think the potential problem could be rectified rather simply:
just build a suitable hash tree of transactions and only subject the
root to the proof-of-work timestamping machinery, while offloading the
millisecond by millisecond processing and storage to auxiliary sites.
That way even high transaction densities would end up being a bona fide
part of the shared log, but only summaries/hashes would need to be
broadcast. Most of the hard, costly work of hashing and publicly storing
those more frequent transactions could be done in a decentralized and
less-trusted fashion, so that the middleman would be at least subjected
to full competition.
I suppose we might try a bit-commit style of bilateral exchange but it
would need to overcome the speed and cost advantages of the TTP.
The Bitcoin economy seems to work somewhere in between. Both in
efficiency, and as everybody knows, privacy as well. At least to me the
question then is, is Bitcoin really at the Pareto frontier with regard
to efficiency, privacy, latency and whathaveyou, at the same time. I'm
not too sure it is.
Well, it's clearly inefficient, but that's a design feature :) Privacy
can't really be claimed as it has a public database, and it's a sucker
for datamining. Latency I gather has its issues too.
If one were to speculate as to some sort of frontier of benefits, then
I'd say when it came to trading, BitCoin would be a distance 10th. A
psuedonymous system is far more efficient and secure, and adding
chaumian blinding adds a modicum of untraceability [0].
No centralised control of the issue is a benefit of BitCoin, but we
would need multiple currencies, grounded in contracts. (Distributed
issuers in open issuance of contracts achieves 98% of the distributed
bounty of BitCoin.)
It's not likely that the remaining of the population could appreciated
it, sure :)
... And then, if
you can't spend willy-nilly, anything you just keep off the market is as
good in the medium run as something that never existed in the first
place; money really doesn't help you much unless you can spend it, which
for the most part makes the entitlement worries moot.
Exactly. This is where hoarding meets Jon's Highlander constant meets
Fort Knox.
iang
[0] Chaumian blinding is only untraceable on paper. In practice, the
untraceability depends on many implementation and economics factors.
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