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Neutrino-Powered Financial Trading In Our Future?
An anonymous reader writes "In a new feature on the future of high-frequency trading, Wired suggests that neutrino-powered financial trading systems may be coming soon, which would enable extremely low-latency information to be transmitted directly through the center of the Earth between major financial exchanges. If finance becomes the killer app for neutrino communication technology, it may ultimately make Neutrino SETI feasible. Quoting: 'It is only a matter of time, perhaps a few decades, says Alexander Wissner-Gross, a Harvard physicist, before some hedge fund decides it needs a particle accelerator to generate neutrinos, and then everyone will want one. Yes, they travel slower than light, but they indisputably can tunnel through the earth, cutting thousands of miles off an intercontinental message. And just a few days before the Battle of the Quants, right before the bad news about faster-than-light neutrinos, researchers announced they had sent a message by neutrino from the Fermilab accelerator in Chicago to a detector a kilometer away. According to Dan Stancil of North Carolina State University, the signal traveled at "very close to" the speed of light. Unfortunately, the data rate was only about 0.1 bits per second, meaning it would be useless for much more than sending a yes/no signal. "With the right modulation scheme, this could be increased by at least one or two orders of magnitude," Stancil said, adding "I don’t know of a compelling commercial application." But we’ve all heard the (apocryphal) story that Thomas J. Watson of IBM predicted "a world market for maybe five computers."'"
Never will happen. too hard to detect don't care what anyone says.
If you send the neutrino on too weak a power it will face interferences from other neutrinos produced by natural radioactive decay and solar processes
But if you want to send your neutrino and to ensure people on the other side of the planet can receive it, you have to send it at least with a power of in the order of millions of electron-volts - that is a lot of juice we are talking about !!
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
...like the value of your opinion.
'tis goen through the planet core.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Who needs fast data rates? No need to send the entire stock exchange of information through this thing. If you can have the price information for two or three key stocks even a half second before everyone else I suspect you could make a killing. Pick a different stock every day, or a couple times a day. They say the throughput could be increased a couple levels right now with the right coding scheme? Give it five years and I bet they can get another order of magnitude out of that. 100 bits would be more than enough to send price change info for a couple of stocks.
Neutrinos still only go at c
What we need is tachyon communication for stock trading
Some of our highest technological achievements end up being used to do one of two things: manipulate capital markets, or blow people up. Expect a neutrino-powered civilian obliterator any day now.
Two questions. Where do you get your crack, and how expensive is it?
It's still higher than that of within the same building or block as the exchange.
Unless the trading exchange is located at the centre of the Earth. Now there's an idea...
Aren't we talking about gigantic scintillation detection tanks here?!
Should be a matter of months before LE decides that HFT is the new America's Cup.
What a Knightmare!
I find it depressing for some reason, that we would develop a technology specifically so a few guys will be able to trade stocks .0000001 second faster.
Couldn't find a 24 hour pharmacy to renew your meds prescription, huh?
In my limited understanding I would expect the energy/maintenance needs of such a network be a tremendous drain on resources over time for potentially no benefit? I suppose the technology that comes out of the consequential research and development may better serve humanity, but using it expressly for financial purposes sounds like a misadventure.
...but can I use it to get the first post on threads from the other side of the planet?
Funnel all the orders through one old guy wearing green eye shades with a ledger book and a Marchant calculator.
Have gnu, will travel.
Not to mention, neutrinos created won't have any specific frequency like with radio and other wireless communications. That means no easy way to filter out everyone else's noise to get your signal. If neutrino communication actually works, it'll be interesting to see what happens when the level of communications hits the "fifty wireless routers in an apartment building" point.
Now the trading algorithms can lose money even faster!
I mean really, if they wanted near zero latency communication, they should just come to me for some basic technology. For instance, a basic, yet expensive, path is telepaths. Right now we would simple takes twins or triplets or whatever, test them for basic ability, and then train them. Pay each 100K a year to be on staff for a few year, then replace then as needed. This would be a great job for someone right out of high school. For the longer term we would go to some country with low regulation and genetically engineer the telepaths. At first this would be just selective breeding and early training, but eventually we should have labs set up to create telepaths on demand. Pay for their room and board, keep them on for 10 years, then send them on their way with a couple million in trust.
A more expensive and lower bandwidth method would be quantum entanglement. Chang the spin on one particle, it's entangled particle will immediately be changed as well. A 8 bit system could be built, An alternating all up then all down could be sent as a metronome, then an STX, then a certain amount of datadata, then and ETX, then a check sequence, then an EOT. Speed would be limited on by how long one must hold a state for reading. The advantage here is that there is absolutely not latency.
You see, there are always simple solutions when one thinks about it.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
I predict quantum entanglement is a more viable basis for any future communications system.
Yeah, sure!
What do you think would have happened if those guys at Knight Capital had used this already? In 45 min they could have burned ALL the money in the world! Ouch! ...
Wait a minute, this might be a good thing after all ... go ahead, folks!
I like my spaghetti with source.
No more depressing than all the energy and technology we develop to make a guy's dick bigger, and he'll still get turned down.
This is absolutely disgusting, and any society where such a thing is a feasible way of extracting profit, is completely morally bankrupt.
And we thought, nuclear war is the worst thing that can come from fundamental Physics research. Now nuclear war seeme to be a valid solution to the society that is run by financial companies who run DoS and man in the midle attack on all trade and production, to extract money from everyone.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Look at the effort used in detecting them at this time. This is just a writer with some imagination but no understanding of the facts.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_Law_of_Headlines
The real question, what is his dealer cutting it with?
Neutrino detectors can be built that can measure directionality and energy of the neutrino. You would only have to worry about someone else transmitting within ~100 km using the same process.
Sorry guys, I created a monster. :)
should involve regulations that limit the rate at which trades can be made or that put a cost on high-frequency trades such as to remove their profit incentives. It's an investment market, we don't need thieves grabbing mismatched buy/sell orders and sitting in the middle shaving pennies off transactions. You know all those movies where someone proposes "rounding" sub-penny transaction losses down to the nearest penny and adding them all to a bank account? Someone on Wall Street saw that and said "bro, we can totally do this lulz! Just give us a way to trade faster than anyone else, and we'll make BILLIONS!" How is this still legal? I mean by every definition this is theft. I, for one, don't want to see us trying to come up with technologies to help these billionaires continue robbing you, me, and everyone else.
It fails to state just how not good we are at detecting neutrinos. If all the matter across the interior of the planet doesn't stop/defelct the neutrino, some little foot long antenna or something isn't going to either. They're not nearly that easily detectable. Let's see...what do I know of that we have right now that already solves this problem? Oh yeah, entangled particles. I think the record is like 10 feet away from each other but if we can get them 15,000 miles away from each other, tada, a delay of 0. Nobody seems to have any explanation for why we can't move them farther away from each other but once we get that fixed, there isn't a whole lot more to it than that.
No, indeed...
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
And since they will all be trying to transmit from as close to the major stock exchanges as possible...
Not a sentence!
Really? Why wouldn't you lease some rackspace at the NYSE instead? They have that, and it's in demand because latency is in the microseconds. Why would you build a pair of neutrino guns, which is to say, GIGANTIC miles-long particle accelerators, and a pair of neutrino detectors, which is to say, GIGANTIC scintillators made out of heavy water and mineshafts, just so you could put a 1U server in Australia or some damn place?
Whoever posted this story, I hope you're happy, because we're all dumber for having read it.
Many people pay the quick traders money, so the traders can try to make them money. I don't hear complaints about the people who pay traders. Maybe those people should play it safe and invest in safer investments, and avoid the commissions that finance this gambling. That would reduce 'morally bankrupt activity'.
It took less than 100 years to go from the invention of the automobile to man walking on the Moon. It's quite possible that it won't go anywhere within 100 years (electric cars, anyone?), but it's also possible that our grandchildren will think it's funny that we had to use electromagnetism to transmit information!
dom
Entanglement communication is far more interesting. Spooky, distant, simultaneous communication? Yes please.
Just imagine courriers delivering what amounts to communication fuel. This is a bad sci fi novel waiting to happen.
I think there's more mileage to be had from gravity-based communication systems. For example, take the "Mach Lorentz Thruster". It's basically a capacitor that is oscillated back and forth very rapidly with synchronized cycles of charging and discharging.
The original reason for it was to generate a net thrust by charging the capacity pushing it in one direction, discharging it, and then pushing it back again. This generates a net force since a charged capacitor by relativity has slightly more mass than a discharged capacitor.
One side effect though is that if you already have a gravity signal of the appropriate frequency, then such an oscillating system can pick up that signal. In other words, the MLT can produce a gravity based signal and pick up a gravity based signal. All in theory, of course. But at least it's progressed to the point where one can generate detectable levels of thrust with it. One could probably generate the gravity signal merely by vibrating a massive weight at the right frequency.
Now one such MLT acts so I understand a lot like a dipole antenna. I think it should be possible to make a large phased array of these things and have an ability to detect gravity signals of a tuned frequency, more or less what would be wanted for communication. And it should have better gain by a very large amount (like pretty much everything else does) than a corresponding antenna for neutrinos.
Are you suggesting that it was a profitable financial enterprise?
No, but neither was Christopher Columbus' first trip. It was what came after that was profitable. It took ~100 years for the first successful colonies and ~350 years after that to have the largest GDP in the world. The US landed on the moon 40 years ago so lets talk in ~400 years time about whether it was a profitable venture.
So what? If high-frequency traders can steal even a fraction of a cent from the market for every electron-volt used they make out like the bandits they are. An eV is actually a tiny amount of energy - 1kWh = 22 billion billion MeV. There's room for lots of really hideous inefficiencies in there before you'll even notice your energy costs
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
If you send the neutrino on too weak a power it will face interferences from other neutrinos produced by natural radioactive decay and solar processes
First electron-volts measure energy. Power is energy per unit time i.e. joules per second. Energy is a property of each neutrino - a neutrino does not have a power. Power is a property of a beam of neutrinos and is the mean neutrino energy multiplied by the mean number of neutrinos emitted per second. Worse, your suggestion that neutrinos with millions of electron-volts of energy will be needed to avoid interference with radioactive decay could not be more wrong: radioactive decays emit neutrinos at MeV energies! MeV neutrinos will have very similar energies to those from natural radioactive decays!
But if you want to send your neutrino and to ensure people on the other side of the planet can receive it, you have to send it at least with a power of in the order of millions of electron-volts
Again you are confusing energy and power. There are two ways to detect neutrinos over background: beam intensity and energy. Accelerators generally produce neutrinos with GeV energies (billions of electron-volts). These have some background from cosmic rays hitting the atmosphere but give more directional information when detected i.e. you can tell where they came from better than low energy neutrinos so you can greatly reduce any background. Alternatively, if you have enough beam power then you can modulate the beam intensity in the remote detector which will modulate the count rate - you just need to have enough neutrinos to dominate the background. Also you need to bury your detectors to avoid backgrounds from cosmic ray muons.
Yeah, nuclear war is a perfectly "valid solution" to the problem. Thanks for your rational input.
hmm, yes mass and energy are same thing, but that c squared factor means you don't get much gravity per Joule. How much energy have you got in one of those capacitors, yes the electricity moves fast, at the 1/3 c. But if you want a gravity of detectable quantities, i think you'd be better off wiggling a massive object quickly.
So with neutrinos you can send a very noisy signal through the earth. Ok fine. And the with a "different modulation" (i.e. Shannon coding) you can send a reliable signal. But Shannon coding always comes at the cost of latency. And the problem this is supposed to solve? Latency.
I hope that by the time this has been developed to assist high frequency trading, that a mandatory minimum time of ownership of stocks of -say- a few days has been established for all stock markets. High frequency trading is detrimental for society.
Either I don't understand the consequences of a neutrino:nucleon reaction cross-section on the order of 10^-43 m^2, or a technology writer is bafflegabbing.
Seriously, why do people need information faster than even the general public can get it?
This doesn't benefit anyone except HFTers that front run based on insider information.
This is just a case of parasites inventing a sharper proboscis.
A play, depicting what went through mind exactly as and when I read it:
> neutrino-powered financial trading systems may be
> coming soon, which would enable extremely low-latency
> information to be transmitted directly through the center
> of the Earth between major financial exchanges.
WHAT
THE
FUCKKKKKKKKKKKKKK!
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
so 100km of fiber optic and then bridge over to neutrino.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
That's an understatement. It is however very beneficial to high frequency traders, who will no doubt be willing to share a large percentage of their windfall with any politicians who might otherwise consider limiting their strip-mining of the free market.
So the question becomes can we find other heavily-monied interests who are on the losing end of the game to rally behind. And could we stomach doing so?
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I agree that HFT is ultimately worthless; however I wouldn't even limit ownership to 'a few days'. Even a few seconds would ruin these types; as such a limit of hours, or even minutes, would be more than sufficient.
Heck, institute a random (up to) 5 second delay and watch them whine.
I don't read AC A human right
the stupid casino will crash and burn before we get to that !
With the right modulation scheme, this could be increased by at least one or two orders of magnitude
Sure. If anyone ever figures out how to modulate a neutrino beam. Now we're having problems already just detecting them.
I suppose it would be theoretically possible to modulate the accelerator beams, but with the energies involved, I suspect that will be quite a challenge too.
And then there is the small matter of latency. The neutrino beam may be fast, but the whole process of converting the information stream in a modulated beam, and then analyzing the data at the detectors to find the few neutrinos that didn't come from the sun, will take probably more time than sending the data through fiber optics would.
Many thanks for explanation !
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Finally, somebody says it!
How the hell are they going to distinguish their neutrinos, when
1. there are bazillions of bazillions going through earth and their receiving antenna at the same time, and
2. the best detectors, which are gigantic, are happy to catch a couple of them a year, because by definition, they nearly never ever interact with anything
?
I can imagine some cigar-smoking cowboy-hat-wearing fatcat hearing about "ERMAHGERDNEUTREENOWZ!", and thinking this up. Because somebody doesn't understand shit about physics.
The equivalent of frequency, for neutrons, is the particle energy. (Indeed, you can think of radio frequency as being the energy per photon.) By changing the energy at which the particle accelerator operates, you can change the energy of the neutrinos it emits. Your detector can then just ignore any neutrinos it detects with other energies.
Not sure how those suggestions could ever be faster than just using fiber optics going around the surface...
Thereby negating part their speed advantage from being near the exchange.
The speed-of-light delay is significant for HFT at very short distances. 300km = 1 millisecond. Since their trades are being executed on the order of 1 millisecond that is quite significant.
Not a sentence!
I interviewed at a company collecting and organizing high speed trading. The transmission delays of cross country data feeds are very real, but *every time* they invent a new technology for it, most of the benefits are lost with the tremendous error correction and data verification of the poor quality data.
And worse, the feasibility of simply putting FPGA's directly on the feeds where the data leave the stock exchanges has already been shown. By processing the information locally, with a much smaller set of rules and a smaller analysis footprint than the ridiculously large and complex systems currently used, the entire complex transmission and most of the remote data canter costs simply evaporate. The remote datacenter uses the much lower cost per byte slow feeds to *record* recent stock activities and help provide new rules.
The only way to get faster than the local FPGA's is to engage in insider trading, or to deliberately pump and dump a stock. Frankly, that's what high speed trading seems designed to conceal:
1. Queue all orders
2. Delay. 1 second? 2 seconds? Even maybe 5 seconds.
3. Randomise the queue
4. Execute all orders
5. Goto 1
Kills front running, probably kills HFC. Basically strategy proofs the whole thing. Somebody cryptomath geek can probably finess the protocol some more, but this is the basic plan.
Yes, they travel slower than light, but they indisputably can tunnel through the earth, cutting thousands of miles off an intercontinental message.
Question: where is latency? It isn't just in the communication path, it is in the decision path. If you have a human deciding which stocks to buy and sell, milliseconds don't matter. Therefore the decision path must be a computer.
So why not just put the computers making the high-speed decisions as close as possible to each exchange?
(Because then we couldn't write a speculative technology article to bring in page views?)
The only time you would need a high-speed link is if you need to make automated high-speed decisions that depend on the simultaneous status of stocks from multiple exchanges, and my gut feeling is that this wouldn't be very useful. This kind of trader is arguably just a leech on the system anyhow.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
YES! Non-stop, until it gets you to actually do something that stops those kinds of headlines from ever appearing again.
Financial trading has always sat at the crossroads between capitalism and gambling. Tying a gigantic roulette wheel to our economy is obviously risky -- and has led to real national disaster on countless occasions. So why do we allow it? Because the capitalists and traders have convinced most of us that free financial markets lead to optimal financial decisionmaking, reward for innovation, and prosperity for all.
But even if we take as a given, the argument completely falls apart when we're talking about speed-of-light transactions. The time difference between sending neutrinos through the Earth rather than lightspeed signals around it is 24 milliseconds. This is far faster than any voluntary human action. Humanity does not stand to gain anything by making money move from point A to point B 24 milliseconds faster. "All praise the invisible hand of the free market! Now we'll be able to start building our new factory 24 milliseconds sooner!"
This reveals high-frequency trading for what it really is: straight up gambling. Now, I've got nothing against gambling. But when the outcomes affect the global economy and the welfare of billions, it's a problem. Especially since you can gamble on the outcome of *any* complex system, it doesn't have to be the system that feeds us all.
So here's my modest proposal. Delay all financial transactions in all markets by a random time interval of roughly 10 seconds -- negligibly short by human standards, but long and unpredictable enough to destroy high-frequency trading. Instead, encourage open, unfettered, high-frequency speculation on the value of some other complex system -- the location and timing of earthquakes, supernovas, or the weather. At the very least, this will keep the economy safe from the pointless risks of high-frequency gambling. And in the best-case scenario, in their quest to beat the competition, the traders might make some great discoveries in geology, astronomy, or meteorology.
The desirable behaviour of ground penetration is already provided by long wavelength radio transmissions. Bandwidth is low but it works and is used to get messages to submarines, and also by geophysicists that listen in to those military broadcasts to get some ideas of what is very deep underground. I doubt very much the writer of the article has heard of this and they are just looking for a use for something cool to say about something they know very little about.
Is caused when everyone has their pension money in high frequency neutrino trading, and then a nearby supernova accidentally tells all the traders on the planet to sell everything fast...
someone said they just invented the neutrino, because the alternative interpretation
of beta-decay (there's no true-hard causality guaranteed by the universe) was too scary?
Actually, the true reason for the current financial market disaster are experiments for even faster communication: As is well known, nothing travels faster than bad news. Currently there's an experiment in using bad news for quickly communicating transaction information.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Actually, I'd not forbid holding stock that short. I'd just make the taxes for it approach 100%. That is, make it unprofitable.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
high-frequency trading is simply a way to take advantage, arbitrage-like, of failures in market-making. sooner or later, market-makers (and clients, for pete's sake!) will realize this, and simply make HF trading irrelevant. OTOH it may take neutrino-based networking for market makers to do this ;)
besides, if we're looking for exotic physics to leverage, wouldn't entanglement be even better?
This kind of technology uptake always starts with the porn industry, and then spreads to others. Wall Street might be second, at best.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
Again, you don't need to tax it like that to kill the profitability. Even a 1% redemption fee would normally stop these shenanigans cold. It's not a high margin business, what makes it profitable is that you can do it several hundred/thousand times a day.
I don't read AC A human right
has no logical reason to be legal. It does well documented harm to economy as a whole, while not doing any good (except for few... see #3. above)
Actually, you've hit the major problem right on the head. You're not going to want to transmit from close to the stock exchange, you're going to want to receive close to the stock exchange so that you can forward your instructions directly into their computer system. The problem is (in the absence of commercially available neutronium), the neutrino comms equipment is going to be bigger than the computer running your trading algorithms. In which case, you may as well just move it there instead of installing the relay.
Neutrino comms for HFT is solving a problem that doesn't exist. The problem it would solve is doing HFT from a long way away from the exchange, but no one actually does that...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Go tachyons! The trades could be made before the orders were sent.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Please do it.
I have my .308 zeroed in at 400 yards.
I look forward to popping your head like a watermelon.
sorry but your MLT are tin foil hat bullshit. There is no Woodward effect, it is unsubstantiated nonsense never reproduced by reputable experiment. we don't have the means to measure the increase in mass due to charging a capacitor, it is too small
Physics super genius here.
Just get a really long pole that reaches between the two points of communication. Move the pole forward and back for instantaneous communication. No need for FTL anything. You can add more poles or increase the speed of the poles for higher bandwidth.
The Official Site of 1337 Pwnage
The real question, what is his dealer cutting it with?
Neutrinos
what brings us new means of telecommunication...
I'm sorry but your argument makes no sense. Imagine a communication line consisting of 100km fiber from the New York exchange, neutrino link from New York to Tokyo, 100km fiber to the Tokyo exchange. With sufficiently fast neutrino generators and detectors, that means a latency in the 30ms range compared to an ideal latency in the 70ms range using conventional fiber.
If you suddenly discover that your shares in company X are worthless, it is great to have 40ms to get rid of them before anyone else knows.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Where there's will (money and more money to be made), there's a way.
I could easily imagine similar discussion than this about radio or telephone communications just before they became technologically feasible. If you described our mobile phone networks to engineers and scientists of late 19th century, they probably would not believe such technology is even possible, given the hard physical limitations of radio spectrum.
Except for the guy in the office next to the exchange, with fiber going next door. You know, the normal HFT guy.
Not a sentence!
The guy sitting at the Tokyo exchange does not yet know that US company X has gone bankrupt. If you see value of a stock you hold falling dramatically in New York, you want to sell the same stock in Tokyo before anyone there notices. If you are lucky you can unload enough stock to save you from losing a fortune. Similarly for sudden gains which have not yet moved to the other exchanges.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Because they go straight through Earth rather than around. Shorter path means faster.
sure... but the neutrino will still take at least ~40ms to cross the earth.
it's not a difference between 0.3ms and ~0ms, it's the difference between 40 and 40.3.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
And do you have a reason for your opinion? Obviously, Woodward claims to have observed such an effect.
And you sir win the prize for most redundant comment ever.
I wasn't refering to the neutrino going through the earth, but to this conversation about using gravity field to communicate.
And I was too. I really don't get what you are complaining about here. The whole point of these methods is shorter path length and hence shorter communication lag.
Your misrepresentation of the facts is that you are pretending that the people exploited by high frequency traders are their customers. The man in the middle attack is due to HFT using their exclusive high speed access to market information to intervene in trades with people that are not their customers.
Of course either you knew that and are deliberately lying or didn't know and are deliberately lying about having a clue. The only questions here now are why you are lying, why you do it so much on this site and why you feel you need so much attention. As for me, I'm filling in time while other stuff is going on that keeps me at the PC, but it's still so depressing to see what you put on the net.
0 or 1 for "buy/sell"
you have to send it at least with [an energy] of in the order of millions of electron-volts - that is a lot of juice we are talking about !!
So not only are the HFTs going to pour tons of money into perfecting particle accelerators, at an exactly perfect time frame when the LHC needs to be upgraded (with every single one of them wanting one in his backyard, the LHC to SLHC upgrade would end up being done with now-turned-"off-the-shelf" components), but the HTFs could even starts throwing money at ITER and Polywell fusion technologies just to be sure to have the necessary power to supply they particle accelerators !
Now we just need to find a few to persuade them that getting to Mars and interstellar travel are somehow beneficial to hight frequency trading, and suddenly space age will be a reality in just a few years :-P
I sense that "might by applicable to high frequency trading" will become the new "might have military application" money-whoring closing words of any modern research :-D
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]