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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.
Uh huh, and we couldnt go to the moon either.
Never will happen. too hard to do don't care what anyone says.
Did you put your fingers in your ears and scream NANANANANA when you finished saying that rubbish sentence?
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 !
'tis goen through the planet core.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
You insensitive clod. Are you suggesting that going to the moon wasn't a hoax?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
How the fuck do you reach that conclusion? No sell = 0 and sell = 1? With absolutely no way whatever to detect whether it's valid data?
Actually yeah, Knight would probably buy one of those...
The real question, what is his dealer cutting it with?
I forgot the latency through the earth which is about 42ms. So actually you would need to transmit at 100b / (150ms - 42ms) = 952bps just to break even.
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.
THIS IS WHAT AMERICAN PATRIOTS REALLY BELIEVE.
In reality, technology is developed by people who can convince companies to pay them for developing technologies for those companies first. However it never ever happened in the history of mankind that worthwhile technology stayed exclusive to companies where it was developed first.
This shit, of course, is not even a worthwhile technology, it's a way to waste massive amount of energy and space to game a system that should not be allowed to exist in the first place.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
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.
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.
Entanglement communication is far more interesting. Spooky, distant, simultaneous communication? Yes please.
Just a shame there's no actual communication involved, and no way to send information.
The size and shielding requirements will likely mean mobile detectors will be infeasible for the indefinite future, but te far side of the moon is a good example.
The detectors typically have to be very large, and worse, *very* sensitive to detect any neutrino interactions at all. That sensitivity means they have to be very well shielded from all other particles to have any hope of detecting a neutrino over the noise of other particle interactions. For example - the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory in Canada is a 12m sphere full of heavy water, buried 2000m underground to shield it well enough that it can occasionally detect a neutrino, tens of billions of which are passing through every square centimeter of it each second.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Only one way to deal with someone who thinks the moon landing is a hoax:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wcrkxOgzhU
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.
While we may be able to do neutrino signal trading there should never in the first place be a benefit to super-low-latency trading as it doesn't make the market more "market-efficient" it just enables vampiric that contributes nothing but arcane instability to the whole market. HFTs are a cancer equivalent to too big to fail.
The fastest and most responsive markets exist at the moment when a massive financial crisis starts. Everything productive depends on markets being as slow and stable as possible, as long as they aren's slower than the production itself, and we have crossed that boundary in 19th century.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Of course the real question is why you'd be trading in Hong Kong from the US when you can co-locate your servers in Hong Kong and run your trading algorithms there.
The strategy your parent is alluding to is a straight up latency arbitrage where you trade instrument X in market Z based on you getting information from market Y before anyone else.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman