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Comment by PeterisP | Hacker News Reader

It depends on the time, it's public after the fact, but not-public during the time gap where someone like Alameda could do front-running by managing to get in other transactions before the loser's orders get executed, or before any others get the chance to take that order.

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Alameda was in general deeply incompetent. Front running your customers is not all that doable if you insist on using python.

You don’t need speed to front run someone you need special access, which Alameda had.

That said they are being accused of something much less sophisticated. They were allowed to take money out when they made money but didn’t have to pay money in when they lost.

Even if you have special access, if you need 40ms (500ms p999) to compute a square root, you're not gonna be able to make worthwhile decisions on the basis of this access

Those times are wildly inaccurate on modern hardware with modern python, fwiw.

These are our observed latencies for their risk checks after sending millions of orders per day for months at a time (which doesn't sound like much, and isn't much, but is the entire order rate that they gave us while we were doing 0.5% of the maker volume on their exchange).

So it’s not, as you previously stated, the time to compute a square root?

That seemed to be the most computationally demanding portion of their public documentation of the formulas involved

You’re stating confidently that python is orders of magnitude slower than it actually is because of some pseudo code, which you haven’t seen implemented, and you called into across a network link?

…do you see the problem?

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