RE: Can QBT Do What They Say They Can Do ?30 Oct 2023 20:07
@Breq I am not sure on the SaaS due to latency and your mention of HFT got me thinking further.
HFT is microsecond electronic trading and bears a similarity to BTC mining in terms of speed advantages.
Wikipedia has a section on HFT with respect to Latency which suggests to me that SAAS will not work very well for BTC mining. Being close isn't the main issue wrt latency is it the actual network technology, speed of light stuff!
Low-latency strategies
A separate, "naïve" class of high-frequency trading strategies relies exclusively on ultra-low latency direct market access technology. In these strategies, computer scientists rely on speed to gain minuscule advantages in arbitraging price discrepancies in some particular security trading simultaneously on disparate markets.
Another aspect of low latency strategy has been the switch from fiber optic to microwave and shortwave technology for long distance networking. The switch to microwave transmission was because microwaves traveling in air suffer a less than 1% speed reduction compared to light traveling in a vacuum, whereas with conventional fiber optics light travels over 30% slower. Especially since 2011, companies involved in HFT have massively invested in microwaves infrastructure to transmit data across key connections such as the one between New York City and Chicago but also between London and Frankfurt, going through Belgium thanks to a network of former US army antennas. However, microwave transmission requires line-of-sight propagation, which is difficult over long distances, driving some HFT firms to use shortwave radio instead. Shortwave radio signals can be transmitted over a longer distance, but carry less information; in 2020, a hedge fund partner quoted in Bloomberg News said that shortwave bandwidth is insufficient for transmitting full order book feeds for low-latency strategies. Firms have also looked into using satellites to transmit market data.
Maybe FG can speak to Elon and get a Starlink network going...