In the relentless quest to speed up stock trades, space may be the final frontier.
Today, high-frequency traders use microwaves, lasers and advanced kinds of fiber-optic cable to shave fractions of a second off the time it takes to execute trades. It’s a business that depends heavily on the ability to transmit data as quickly as possible between financial centers. price moves in key markets drive fluctuations in other markets, and HFT firms must race from one exchange to another to adjust their trading activity in light of the latest data. Otherwise, they risk losing money to faster HFT firms with fresher information.
Satellite networks orbiting a few hundred miles above the Earth’s surface could represent the next technological leap forward. Starlink, deployed by Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp., has already launched more than 1,000 satellites. Amazon.com Inc., OneWeb Global Ltd. and Telesat Canada are building rival networks set to go live in the coming years. And a UK. space entrepreneur is planning a network that would cater to the high-frequency trading crowd.
The satellites in such constellations would orbit the Earth far closer than older generations of telecommunications satellites. They are also smaller and cheaper to launch. This makes it possible to deploy networks of hundreds or thousands of satellites, in which at least one satellite is always nearby, no matter where on the planet you are, even as the satellites whiz by at thousands of miles an hour. The more advanced projects plan to use laser links between satellites to create speedy data networks covering the globe. With such a network, a Chicago trader could beam U.S. futures prices to a satellite overhead, which would relay them over a chain of several satellites, then down to London. Such space-based connections could be faster than existing networks on Earth.
That has the potential to change the way that high-frequency traders send data between exchanges in North America, Europe and Asia.
....
I made a post about a hardened orbital blockchain potentially resembling bitcoin's next evolution here:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/does-myanmar-illustrate-bitcoins-next-evolution-5326006But had not considered a speed advantage in trading. WIFI and radiowave based communication are often slower than a hard line due to the added abstraction layer of encryption. The main exception being ground based internet censorship, surveillance and national firewalls. Which often produce extremely slow internet speeds due to multiple redundant routing paths and deep packet inspection.
The speed advantage in HFT trading (AFAIK) is usually arbitrage based. With trading houses seeking ways for their trade to execute before others, due to market saturation driving them to compete for the same identical trades.
Could bitcoin's next evolution be defined by a hardened orbital blockchain capable of executing bitcoin transactions. With merchants, traders and consumers executing transactions utilizing satellite based modems or smart phones. This could allow crypto financial networks to continue operating in the event of catastrophic natural disasters and also electrical grid outages.
These questions were posed, in the previous thread. For whatever reason at least half of the responses were sidetracked by myanmar.
Now that wall street appears to be vetting the benefits of satellite based trading and transactions, perhaps cryptocurrency advocates can begin to see some of the benefits.