Please use math. I'll help: How much sooner do you need to break even with a GPU to be able to take advantage of the Moore's law equivalent to offset the higher electricity cost?

Are you saying the historical chart has predictive power?

Yes, the author's logic circuitry is broken

There's a valid answer posted to the article already that brings up electricity costs. It's not just about the ROI with the difficulty levels of today but at what price level a GPU miner vs an FPGA (or ASIC) miner can keep running their rigs.

Quoting from the author in the comments:


"Paid off" doesn't negate the cost of running the rig. 750W for the GPUs, 16W for the FPGA (numbers from the article) = 47 times more expensive. 1.5Ghash/s vs 300Mhash/s = 5 times more hashing power.

5/47 = 0.11

So, the GPU solution the author proposes, with reinvesting the profits into more GPUs, is 11% as effective as going down the FPGA route.

(After having written all this I'm somewhat surprised by my own numbers, but I'll post it anyway. I suspect I'll be corrected)

Yes, that's the myth. It's also unscientific in that it's not falsifiable.


It isn't, of course, you just answered it yourself:


The only way to know (not guess) that your arbitrage trade will result in a profit is however if you cheat. Else you're just lucky in that your trade was executed before someone else's trade. After all, you're not trading based off knowledge no one else has.

FA fund managers and TA scam artists claim that they can beat the market with their "skill". There's no data set, and there have been much research into this topic, that indicates there is such a "skill". If there were, we'd see a skewed bell curve.

... which only exist if you cheat [colocated HFT], else the only factor deciding whether you're successful in using them or not is "luck", not skill, which is what we're discussing.


Quantity? Of all the words that's not the one I would've used. But sure, if you want to use that specific definition I would say that available research puts it at 0%.

(Your terminology, "getting to it", made me quite sure you were not using the accepted definition but something dreamt up from someone who indeed knows how to make money off traders. By selling them get-rich-quick books)

The difference lies in understanding how knowledge from research needs to be built from many stepping stones allowing you to infer something with certainty. If you're not used to that thinking people do expect you to close the loop in a very different way than what you set out to do (and which was the correct thing to do).

Someone else could, if they want to, build upon your work since they now know what results they can with good measure expect to get. Before your paper it was perhaps expected, but not to a degree where no one could've said with certainty that the results would turn out exactly the way they did.

For those who like their things a little more concrete:

Before this paper I knew a lot of people who didn't hesitate at all posting one of their public keys for everyone to see (donations, usually)

After, some of them consider it to be unnecessary leakage of information.

Great work.

No. I'm saying that there's no such thing as "alpha" in FA fund management or TA scams. Do you agree? Your own list of "alpha" examples brought up insider trading, uncovering dirt not known to the larger market etc.

Btw, when you talk to someone who studies actual research papers using terminology from get-rich-quick books doesn't infer a lot of confidence in your argument

Can everyone make money on arbitrage?
Is there a guaranteed window of opportunity where you can lock down the trades?

Now go back to the earlier posts I did in this thread and ask yourself why I already back then suggested doing colocated HFT as one way you indeed can make money on a market. It's not however part of what the FA fund managers and TA scam artists claim that a successful trader does when outperforming the market The so-called "skill" that never turns up in any documented research.

No. Actually there's none.


Adjusted for inflation, no.

... and there's no support for the hypothesis that anyone has ever beaten the market trying to do that. That's the whole point. A lot of traders claim they do, but every time (plenty) anyone has looked into this it turns out that there's no predictive ability involved and the number of traders who beat the market is the same as is predicted by chance alone.

If you're really interested there's a lot of literature on the subject available. Taleb's "Fooled by randomness" is a great start.

I don't think you understand the qualitative difference between actual research and people's beliefs

There's no data set in which a trader has ever outperformed chance. Ever. The only way to do so is to not base the trades on available market data - which is usually referred to inside trading or other forms of manipulation.

If you want to claim differently I urge you to source that information. Please. There's still a Nobel Prize waiting

For anyone looking for a laugh I strongly recommend reading through bonker's posting history There's some really well done trolling in there.

Alright, let's do this again: No trader has ever outperformed chance.

If you have knowledge that is not available to the market, that is cheating, and isn't covered. We're talking about your regular FA fund manager or the TA scam-cooks. Not the CEO telling his friends the results of next week's laboratory testing.

If you want to claim that traders outperform chance you're free to source that information. "I believe", "It's obvious", "This book here about successful traders" etc aren't valid sources - usually because they don't take chance into account.

There are traders who beat the market 10 years straight. It doesn't say anything about year 11, and it doesn't mean you could've predicted who they would be. That's what chance means here.

I'm sorry. The rest of us weren't talking about cheating.

I still don't understand what the point you're trying to make is. Are you talking about trading in the marketplace or cheating? You seem to seriously confuse the two.


"I guess" and "I believe" is considered to be quite poor data.

Fact: No trader ever has outperformed chance.

In this context, I think "pure gold!" is a compliment

Forwarded and shared. I like the focus on how Bitcoin simplifies, staying away from projections of future value etc.

http://www.singularitysummit.com/


I'm quite confident someone from this forum will be there, networking and chatting about Bitcoin.

Oh it could probably be interesting, I just don't understand what point you're trying to make. If you're claiming that by using FA or TA (that is, no insider trading nor theft) it's possible for a trader to outperform chance then feel free to support that viewpoint with data.

If you don't claim that, if your point is that the only way to beat the market is to cheat, then I fully agree with you.