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Yes, the people who created DEXes do know about and advertise this issue, because this is work we've been doing since early 2017 and discussing with them even e

Yes, the people who created DEXes do know about and advertise this issue, because this is work we've been doing since early 2017 and discussing with them even earlier. In fact, I advise a lot of those projects, and many consider me the SME on DEX frontrunning. I'm also the reason 0x e.g. released a bot to explicitly do this. To claim this is what they were designing for is just ignorance of the space though. None of them knew about or even anticipated this issue; just because it is obvious to you does not mean it was obvious to them. Just because DEXes are only for regulatory arbitrage (your words, not mine) doesn't mean that we should stand up crappy market designs. The majority of the paper is about the formalization of and data on PGAs and miner OO, which was also not known in the blockchain community until now. If you point me to a reference to the contrary, or that contains the same results as e.g. Sections 5-7 of our paper, I'll gladly cite this and reduce my claims of novelty. Otherwise, this is something I've been working on for years, I'm going to stick with it, and it's up to peer review in the scientific community to decide :). I hear what you are saying, but your preconceptions about Flash Boys being a bad book seem to be severely coloring your understanding of the work!

tptacek 8y ago
They aren't "preconceptions". A preconception about the book would be if they hadn't read it, weren't familiar with it, and had opinions about it anyways. Flash Boys is a bad book. I'd argue that your desire to immunize the book, which is largely unrelated to your paper, from criticism is harming the case you're trying to make about distsys flaws in DEX's. The paper is good! The surrounding context you're trying to provide about how real-money markets work, perhaps not so much.
- phildaian 8y ago
  I'm not saying he has preconceptions about the book, I'm saying his opinion of the book is creating unwarranted preconceptions about our work. The paper doesn't comment on money markets much at all, and cites pretty unambiguous peer reviewed work which is highly substantiated when it does.
  - tptacek 8y ago
    Sorry, I was confused because you referred to his "preconceptions of Flash Boys as a bad book", and also talked at some length about how industry insiders don't like the book on Twitter, and also alluded to practices described by Flash Boys that insiders want to hide upthread.
scottlocklin 8y ago
Virtually all existing market designs are crappy. Maybe CBOT is an exception. Michael Lewis' book is a big giant marketing document for a shitty market design, FWIIW: not a preconception; I read and panned his ridiculous book. I didn't think you made the case in your sections 5-7. 7 in particular looked like speculation to the point of paranoia (which, admittedly, is justifiable in blockchain, but for the kinds of dollar amounts you're quoting -rather unlikely). I'll read it again to make sure.
- phildaian 8y ago
  Well, we show (among many other results) that today's system is potentially unstable assuming miners are rational and profit maximizing. I don't think that's paranoia in a system that gives you 0 security guarantees unless you assume miners are rational and profit maximizing. > Virtually all existing market designs are crappy. Maybe CBOT is an exception. Michael Lewis' book is a big giant marketing document for a shitty market design, FWIIW: not a preconception; I read and panned his ridiculous book. I'm not saying anything promoted by Lewis is a good market design, nor that existing continuous limit order books are. Merely that from the PoV of the efficient markets hypothesis, blockchain markets are worse (and have the potential to be better, e.g. by exploring batched designs).
  - scottlocklin 8y ago
    Yes, blockchain markets are worse in many ways; that's obvious. But I don't think your speculation about miners has any merit. Your statement in section 7 seems to not understand how blockchains work. I could be wrong; it don't pass the sniff test. Since I actually have a day job, I may not have time to look into this in enough detail to thoroughly pull it apart, but hey, maybe they'll catch it in "peer review."
    - phildaian 8y ago
      If you find something wrong with it, consider this an open offer for me to revise or withdraw the paper as a result. That being said, I've been studying blockchains for years, and this paper has been reviewed by some very high caliber designers of blockchain protocols in both academia and industry. It also uses very simple models as in http://randomwalker.info/publications/mining_CCS.pdf http://randomwalker.info/publications/mining_CCS.pdf which in my view are extremely unlikely to be incorrect (of course, anything is possible).

tptacek 8y ago

They aren't "preconceptions". A preconception about the book would be if they hadn't read it, weren't familiar with it, and had opinions about it anyways. Flash Boys is a bad book. I'd argue that your desire to immunize the book, which is largely unrelated to your paper, from criticism is harming the case you're trying to make about distsys flaws in DEX's. The paper is good! The surrounding context you're trying to provide about how real-money markets work, perhaps not so much.

phildaian 8y ago
I'm not saying he has preconceptions about the book, I'm saying his opinion of the book is creating unwarranted preconceptions about our work. The paper doesn't comment on money markets much at all, and cites pretty unambiguous peer reviewed work which is highly substantiated when it does.
- tptacek 8y ago
  Sorry, I was confused because you referred to his "preconceptions of Flash Boys as a bad book", and also talked at some length about how industry insiders don't like the book on Twitter, and also alluded to practices described by Flash Boys that insiders want to hide upthread.

scottlocklin 8y ago

Virtually all existing market designs are crappy. Maybe CBOT is an exception. Michael Lewis' book is a big giant marketing document for a shitty market design, FWIIW: not a preconception; I read and panned his ridiculous book. I didn't think you made the case in your sections 5-7. 7 in particular looked like speculation to the point of paranoia (which, admittedly, is justifiable in blockchain, but for the kinds of dollar amounts you're quoting -rather unlikely). I'll read it again to make sure.

phildaian 8y ago
Well, we show (among many other results) that today's system is potentially unstable assuming miners are rational and profit maximizing. I don't think that's paranoia in a system that gives you 0 security guarantees unless you assume miners are rational and profit maximizing. > Virtually all existing market designs are crappy. Maybe CBOT is an exception. Michael Lewis' book is a big giant marketing document for a shitty market design, FWIIW: not a preconception; I read and panned his ridiculous book. I'm not saying anything promoted by Lewis is a good market design, nor that existing continuous limit order books are. Merely that from the PoV of the efficient markets hypothesis, blockchain markets are worse (and have the potential to be better, e.g. by exploring batched designs).
- scottlocklin 8y ago
  Yes, blockchain markets are worse in many ways; that's obvious. But I don't think your speculation about miners has any merit. Your statement in section 7 seems to not understand how blockchains work. I could be wrong; it don't pass the sniff test. Since I actually have a day job, I may not have time to look into this in enough detail to thoroughly pull it apart, but hey, maybe they'll catch it in "peer review."
  - phildaian 8y ago
    If you find something wrong with it, consider this an open offer for me to revise or withdraw the paper as a result. That being said, I've been studying blockchains for years, and this paper has been reviewed by some very high caliber designers of blockchain protocols in both academia and industry. It also uses very simple models as in http://randomwalker.info/publications/mining_CCS.pdf http://randomwalker.info/publications/mining_CCS.pdf which in my view are extremely unlikely to be incorrect (of course, anything is possible).