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I think much of the effort is wasted. When you hire embedded designers to program FPGAs and ASICs just to be a few nanoseconds faster in your rent-seeking, it's a bloody shame.

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Technology is making the existing system much more efficient, lowering the total amount of "rent-seeking" in the system.

If this was any other industry it would be lauded. I don't understand the moralizing about this industry while we applaud start ups for building ever more complex twitter aggregators.

Last time I checked, twitter programmers don't have a record of destroying economies nor deep capturing regulators.

What economy did low latency trading destroy? Also, is there any more deep capturing of regulators in the finance space post low latency trading than there was pre?

This is an ignorant statement. The cause of the economic crash in 2008 was leveraged bets on lots of bad debt. These bets were made by fratboys in suits, shaking hands and making phone calls and sending emails. The financial instruments they used to do this were bespoke one-off deals, not securities traded on public exchanges.

High frequency trading had nothing to do with any of this. HFT deals in fungible instruments traded in public markets.

But if you do it to mine bitcoins, you're a visionary.

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