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Comment by akira2501 | Hacker News Reader

I'm uncomfortable with the tax dollars of hard working people being used to defend the likes of those who use robots with million dollar wallets to rake up the low hanging fruit of digital arbitrage on an entirely unregulated network.

They wanted the rewards that came with this risk. Now that they got hustled, they cry foul, and the DOJ is going to spend huge amounts of money litigating their case?

Perhaps it is in and of itself just a new form of "front-running justice" or "administrative arbitrage." What wonderful new things our digital world has brought us.

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TFA: "They worry that this microsecond-scale competition between algorithms is socially wasteful"

I would LOVE to see a stock market that

(a) time-penalizes large orders -- 1 share trades in a microsecond, 10000 shares takes a week to execute

(b) adds a random time delay to all orders in the range of [0,60] minutes for corporations, [0,10] minutes for residential traders, and [0,1] minutes for people who have provably low income

This will restore opportunities to real humans and drastically reduce the advantages that institutions and robots have.

IEX runs with similar goals in mind to ban HFTs with special access and level the playing field.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEX

> people who have provably low income

You want to give all your financial info to your brokerage?

What increasing latency will do is widen the markets. We’ll go back to the days of multiple cents or dollars between the bid and offer prices of stocks.

It will definitely increase the time horizon to make an investment profitable. But maybe that’s a societal good for some people…

In the modern era, adding a speed bump might just mean that all the trading moves overseas, to derivatives, or mutual funds. Money finds a way of flowing downhill

> You want to give all your financial info to your brokerage?

You have little choice anyway. Once you give them your identification, which is required by KYC laws, it's a small matter of getting your financial information from the data brokers who possess it.

I think this runs counter to the purpose of having a stock market. The stock market is not supposed to let everyone can gamble on a level playing field, it is supposed to make it as easy as possible for companies to raise money.

> they got hustled, they cry foul, and the DOJ is going to spend huge amounts of money litigating their case?

Do we know how the case originated? I similarly agree this seems bizarre. It’s probably illegal. But unless it’s setting an important precedent it seems like a waste of public money.

> But unless it’s setting an important precedent

It is

> Do we know how the case originated?

This is a very curious question because it’s such a technical situation that it’s hard to believe DOJ wasn’t most likely explained it by outside parties, most likely the victims I assume.

Oh it won't be a waste. DoJ will seize, fine, and disgorge enough to cover the prosecution and some. An easy cash grab from an unsympathetic defendent who lacks the lawyers of the corporate bot runners.

The government believes it’s entitled to taxes on the usd value of any acquired digital coins/tokens. I’d have more sympathy to your perspective if this wasn’t the case (although I’m still sympathetic)

My guess is the government is trying to disincentivize tax evasion and money laundering.

Its technically not tax evasion until they don't pay taxes on it, right? All they did was usurp people who were already cheating. If they were really concerned about tax evasion and money laundering, the feds could've just opened a case, assigned a few agents to it and then waited. They knew who did it, how they did it and still went after them before any real crime had been committed.

100% agree. Tax dollars should be used to regulate/protect things which are valuable for society.

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