[LEAPSECS] Focus in the debate, alternative proposal

[Zefram]

Warner Losh wrote:

>                                                          If you look at  

>the news, you'll find that microseconds do matter.  See  

>http://www.infoworld.com/d/the-industry-standard/hackers-find-new-way-cheat-wall-street-everyones-peril-699 

>if you think that it doesn't matter.


I read a few years ago about investment banks now paying through
the nose to get their machines hosted inside exchange buildings,
in order to shave microseconds off their latency.  This results in a
silly arms race.  It occurred to me that there's a simple way to avoid
this collective waste of resources while keeping things fair: resolve
trades on a regular cadence that gives everyone plenty of time to react.
A cadence of one second should be fine.  At xx.0, the exchange servers
announce the results of the most recent batch of trades.  Everyone then
has until xx.8 to submit trade requests, and the order in which requests
arrive is ignored.  The exchange has from xx.8 to (xx+1).0 to match
up requests into actual trades.  With 800 ms to receive data from the
exchange, execute one's trading algorithm, and submit the next requests
to the exchange, the traders' machines can be located anywhere on Earth
without losing out due to latency.

-zefram