> I think we can all sleep easy that the terrifyingly smart rich people made the right call on how to handle their own exposure.
My personal Venn diagram of "terrifyingly smart people" and "people involved with cryptocurrency" is a null set.
My personal Venn diagram of "terrifyingly smart people" and "people involved with cryptocurrency" is a null set.
But even if it all ends in tears it will have financed research in:
- Byzantine consensus - Gossip protocols in P2P networking - Zero-Knowledge Proofs - Auction Theory - Verifiably Random Functions - Virtual Machine execution cost models
right off the top of my head.
https://www.alameda-research.com/the-team
https://www.lmax.com/press-centre
From IO-HK: “ Philip is professor of theoretical computer science at the University of Edinburgh and senior research fellow at IOHK since 2017. He is an ACM fellow and a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and a past chair of ACM Sigplan. Previously, he worked or studied at Stanford, Xerox Parc, Carnegie Mellon, Oxford, Chalmers, Glasgow, Bell Labs, and Avaya Labs, and visited as a guest professor at Copenhagen, Sydney, and Paris. He has an h-index of 70 with more than 24,000 citations, according to Google Scholar. He contributed to the designs of Haskell, Java, and XQuery. Philip is a co-author of Introduction to Functional Programming (Prentice Hall, 1988), XQuery from the Experts (Addison-Wesley, 2004), Java Generics and Collections (O’Reilly, 2006) and Programming Language Foundations in Agda (2018). He has delivered invited talks in locations ranging from Aizu to Zurich. Philip is a past holder of a Royal Society-Wolfson research merit fellowship, and a winner of Sigplan awards for both distinguished service (2004-09) and most influential paper (‘Imperative functional programming’, by Simon Peyton Jones and Philip Wadler).”
It's kind of a new thing for them. They do HFT and the like in normal financial markets.
>Jump Trading is a registered broker-dealer and member of multiple exchanges including the CME Group and the New York Stock Exchange.[13][4] They are also members of most European exchanges including Eurex and the London Stock Exchange.[14][15]
>In September 2021, Jump announced their cryptocurrency business through a new brand named Jump Crypto
Also from their website:
>We empower exceptional talents in Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science to seek scientific boundaries, push through them, and apply cutting-edge research to global financial markets.
so they sound a bit more of a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance_Technologies type outfit
It’s a very opaque business, but AFAIK Jump’s bread-and-butter desks are more like ultra-low-latency microwave-tower Chicago <-> NY/NJ arbitrage.
When conducted ethically (which ic clearly not always), arbitrageurs and market makers provide a critical, socially useful function. There are ways to cheat, and people do everyday, but that’s any business.
Retail traders benefit from ethical HFT whether that’s on ARCA or Binance. I’m not sure the same can be said for things like PFOF, intentionally mispriced IPOs, or offering crypto traders 100x leverage.
I’m a bit of an FP weenie so I’d probably be most starstruck by meeting Wadler, but yeah, heavy, heavy hitters.