BitCoinnnnnnnnzzzzzzzzzzz
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But they used to have larger bills, mainly for transfers between banks.
We had bigger; for instance, the Titan. It's worth £100,000,000. And is the size of an A4 sheet of paper.No, that's not a typo. It really is worth one hundred million pounds.
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Dollars could be if the backers of the currency wanted to. There used to be mills, for example.
Yep -- I've seen systems that provide six-place precision and accuracy for currency computations -- some fee systems used between banks require this. (A few thousanths of a penny per transaction still adds up over time and volume...)
The gold standard is really an anachronism; its basis was the idea that every country accepted gold in exchange. With the advent of fiat currencies and fiat exchange systems, gold is really no longer needed as an intermediary. We now exchange value directly.
I have wondered if cryptocurrencies could be used as a distributed exchange medium...The main problem is it relies on software. Software is virtually guaranteed to have bugs, and here a bug means losing all your money. Oh noes. Even with a formally verified "bitcoinlib", an OS flaw could easily leak your private keys.
Yeah, not that a buggy piece of bank software couldn't eat your money all the same, though (wouldn't surprise me if it happened to some bank somewhere...). I suspect a full production-grade cryptocurrency implementation will use hardware key security (I'm personally a fan of the ATECC108A as it's relatively inexpensive and doesn't require signing your life away just to get it to talk with you, although it doesn't support the curve the BTC protocol uses...).The concept was cool - nearly instant worldwide transfers with low processing fees, not tied to your identity. The implementation ended up fucked, happens.
Yeah, there are definitely kinks to be worked out still...the concept has merit though, both individually and institutionally. I'm not a big fan of investing in it directly, though, because of:Actually, as time goes on it sounds exactly like the currency market, which is nastier than the stock market because it's a true zero-sum game. Because that's what it is.
I can't see why slowing the overall trade rate should alter the risk of overshoot on any given trade. What model are you using that suggests this should be the case?
It's introducing a delay into a feedback control system -- those result in rather nasty impulse response behavior.And since VAT has to be paid through the bank, you get to pay taxes on your taxes. Yay!
:cringe.btc:
Where in HADES do you live?!
That's ludicrously unjust. And you have no option to walk to the local tax office and pay in cash, or something that's free of transaction costs?
QFT -- I'm standing with Blakey here. Someone was seriously not thinking about the consequences of their lawmaking...
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(A few thousanths of a penny per transaction still adds up over time and volume...)
You know, like in Superman 3.
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Yep -- I've seen systems that provide six-place precision and accuracy for currency computations -- some fee systems used between banks require this. (A few thousanths of a penny per transaction still adds up over time and volume...)
The documentary "Office Space" covers this in depth.
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Yeah, not that a buggy piece of bank software couldn't eat your money all the same, though (wouldn't surprise me if it happened to some bank somewhere...).
Right, but there's someone responsible and in charge at a bank.
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You know, like in Superman 3.
Doesn't need to be that big -- if at the end of the day, you're off by five cents compared to the counter party, that's still a problem because the reconciliation logic doesn't care about the magnitude of the error, and will kick out an error all the same to alert you to "hey, these numbers don't match up, something's wrong here"; it's like having your cash drawer short or long some coins at the end of the day -- you can't just go "oh, screw it, I'm closing up shop anyway"!
I live in Argentina.
Yeah, I wouldn't want any part of living down there from what I've heard...Filed under: this is why isolationism is bad
Right, but there's someone responsible and in charge at a bank.
Or at least, you hope...with the way banks are going these days, they might as well be faceless monsters where nobody you can talk to can help you and nobody that can help you will talk to you...
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Ugh I give up.
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Yeah, I wouldn't want any part of living down there from what I've heard...
Filed under: this is why isolationism is bad
What do you mean? We're signing secret deals* with the Chinese to let them set up bases in our territory, sucking up to Russia and trying to sell nuclear technology to Iran. We're on the belgium-ing winning team here.
*Secret in that the details are not made public to the populace, of course.
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More like "you folks can't trade with anyone worth anything for anything" because of the shortage of exchange currency down there; worse yet, your Customs are ridiculous from what I've heard...
Ugh I give up.
Never heard a teller racking his or her brain at the end of the day over an unbalanced cash drawer, eh? Well, what I'm talking about is simply that particular headache, only with the "cash drawer" the bank is using to exchange money with some other bank.
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I have wondered if cryptocurrencies could be used as a distributed exchange medium...
You can use anything that two parties agree to use. The biggest problems I see right now is that they tend to be a little more unstable than the run of the mill currencies and, worse, that may be subject to influence by the designers.
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More like "you folks can't trade with anyone worth anything for anything" because of the shortage of exchange currency down there; worse yet, your Customs are ridiculous from what I've heard...
Not quite. The situation is a bit complex, but I'll try to give the highlights. So at the beginning of the 90's, we had a horribly depreciated currency, as a result of hyperinflation. We rebased our currency, adopting the peso and choosing to tie it to the dollar. That worked to get a handle on inflation, but stressed other parts of our economy. We also privatized a bunch of services to lower government spending. Some of the privatizations were decent (the electric and telephone companies improved), others not so much (the way the federal oil company was handled was a disgrace).
Some people made off as bandits (politicians and their friends), some people were better off, a lot of people grew poorer; the usual. After a decade of that, the system was no longer sustainable. Since the only way things change here is when shit hits the fan, they first prevented people from taking their money out of the banks, then did away with the "convertibility" (the law that 1 peso = 1 dollar), converted any deposits in dollars to pesos at a fixed rate and declared that any debts in dollars would be converted to pesos.
So, people that had their savings in dollars got screwed, and people that had debts in dollars were given huge benefits. There was a bit of chaos for a couple of years, and eventually things settled. As always, people with access to the government made out as bandits, everyone else got screwed. In an attempt to stabilize things, the government fixed the rates on electricity and gas. At this time we were still self sufficient in terms of energy. The drop in activity that resulted from the 2001 crisis meant that we had some free capacity so no one really cared about energy.
Then the geniuses kept the rates on energy fixed for ten years, despite growing inflation. The way this was possible was that instead of the energy companies getting oil or gas directly, the state would sell it to them at a fixed rate. They also relaxed the requirements on them, such as reinvestment targets and such.
As the country recovered, energy demand grew. A bunch of things happened then. Our own oil reserves started to dry up, since the oil companies didn't bother to do exploration (as the price they were forced to sell at was fixed so the state could then sell it at a fixed price to the energy companies). Since everyone had enjoyed essentially free energy, due to years of fixed rates and growing inflation (with nearly matching salary increases), energy was also wasted. So we had to start importing energy for the first time.
Of course, we couldn't force the rest of the world to give us free energy, so the state would import the gas and oil (which was bought at prices even higher than the international price, because of course they did), then sell it back to the energy companies, thus subsidizing residential consumption. However, as the imported energy grew to become a larger percentage of the whole, this became an ever increasing cost (I think it was something like ten thousand million dollars last year).
To get the dollars they needed to subsidize everyone and pretend things were fine, they added laws to more closely control what people did with their money. In particular, any dollars that enter the country had to be converted to pesos at the rate the state fixed. And if you want to buy dollars, you have to ask permission to the government, which assigns a quota based on your income. This mostly affects the export of agricultural commodities, particularly soy beans. The government is so dependent on these exports that public officials often attack farmers for holding on to their crops and only selling as they need to.
Obviously, since they don't want other people to spend dollars that they need, there are insane tariffs on imports. It's not even protectionism, we tax stuff that we have no way of producing here, even. So for example, prices for electronics (something I feel keenly) are double or triple what they are in the US.
So it's not that we can't trade, so much as it is that we're not allowed to, or taxed outrageously for doing so.
This is a very short and quick overview of the most grievous errors made in the last 25 years. There's a lot of nuance that is missing.
For reference, the same party ruled between 91-99 and 2003-present. 99-2001 was opposition, which left the government before finishing their cycle due to the crisis, 2001 to 2003 was an interim government chosen by Congress (we had a week where we went through five presidents). And the current party, after 12 years in power, most of which had a lapdog congress that passes anything they want, still blames the 91-99 period (where their own party was in control too) and the 2001 crisis (which they did their best to encourage) for every new mess they make.
I do agree that our Customs are ridiculous.
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introducing a delay into a feedback control system -- those result in rather nasty impulse response behavior
Not if the other effect of introducing the delay is to limit the bandwidth of the impulses themselves.
It seems to me that the "nasty impulse response behavior" you're talking about in this instance is as much a result of HFT as something HFT can usefully control.
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Not if the other effect of introducing the delay is to limit the bandwidth of the impulses themselves.
It seems to me that the "nasty impulse response behavior" you're talking about in this instance is as much a result of HFT as something HFT can usefully control.
So, basically limiting the output slew rate, instead of delaying the feedback? Interesting...that'd make more sense at least, speaking from a control theoretic perspective.
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limiting the output slew rate, instead of delaying the feedback?
Seems to me that imposing a trade rate cap would do both of those things at the same time to the same extent; I would expect prices overall to remain largely unaffected, and arbitrage to remain about as lucrative in aggregate, just harder to monopolize.
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There's multiple possible solutions.
There's a new exchange that uses a delay-line to ensure that the results of trades are delayed by a reasonable amount of time, removing most of the opportunity for sub-millisecond arbitrage. (Through the very low-tech solution of coiling like 60 km of fiber in a filing cabinet.)
NYSE in the past talked about the time-slice solution, where you queue-up transactions until the time-slide hits, run the queued transactions during the slice, then make the results available at the beginning of the next slice. So basically, if your time-slice is 5 seconds, you delay knowing the results of the transaction attempt for 5-10 seconds.
Either way's a good solution.
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I like the time-slice approach, especially if you also randomly order the actions to be processed within a slice.
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I don't see what the problem is either way. If you're a retail investor, it's pretty pointless to whine about the sub-millicent loss you might take on a transaction when you have to pay $7.99 or more on brokerage fees. If you're an institutional retail investor, you're doing fairly high frequency trading to hedge your positions and benefit from the higher liquidity. If you're Goldman Sachs, you're hedging your market-making operations. In short, high frequency trading helps institutions earn the risk-free rate (i.e., the rate at which bonds earn interest). This literally means 0 economic profit.
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NYSE in the past talked about the time-slice solution, where you queue-up transactions until the time-slide hits, run the queued transactions during the slice, then make the results available at the beginning of the next slice. So basically, if your time-slice is 5 seconds, you delay knowing the results of the transaction attempt for 5-10 seconds.
There's talk at Nanex about changing the rules so that quotes must remain valid for at least one full second, or else they don't really count (don't set the national rate, don't affect the ticker, don't sit in Consolidated Quoting System delay hell and clog it against actual quotes, aren't broadcast to other exchanges when it'd just be cancelled before it'd even reach them...).
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I like the time-slice approach, especially if you also randomly order the actions to be processed within a slice.
If you do the time-slice, order doesn't matter because the results of the transactions can't be known until the end of the time-slice.
Or, put another way, the price for each stock can't change during the processing of a slice's worth of transactions.
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There's talk at Nanex about changing the rules so that quotes must remain valid for at least one full second, or else they don't really count
That would also work, but I think one second is probably too short. I'd rather see 5 seconds.
