phildaian
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 which in my view are extremely unlikely to be incorrect (of course, anything is possible).
> 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).
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.
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!
Yes, it's very surprising, no, shocking, that people on Wall St. are reluctant to have behaviors like this called out publicly....
I am not Michael Lewis and cannot speak to the accuracy of his facts; our work is a scientific paper backed by a lot of data currently undergoing peer review. The views on HFT and market design in the paper are similarly informed by cited work that is quite extensive in its data analysis, and peer reviewed. I recommend you read it!
There are a few different points here. Firstly, there are plenty of unambiguous definitions of frontrunning that are accepted by the scientific community that this blatantly does fall under; see the Clark SoK we cite in our paper for this in the blockchain space, or the definition Wikipedia uses, which was from an economics article by Khan & Lu (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1140694): "trading by some parties in advance of large trades by other parties, in anticipation of profiting from the price movement that follows the large trade."
The second point here is even if you want to restrict the definition to require privileged information, privilege in p2p networks is not binary: there are some nodes that are better peered on the topology, have better mining equipment, etc. who can use these privileges to extract market rent, harming the security of a blockchain.
This is a complex and dense paper that took 8 people 18 months to produce, and I recommend you read it with an open mind, rather than having a gut reaction to whether we use your preferred definition of "frontrunning". I also recommend reading the primary source material directly, or at least my summary on Twitter - https://twitter.com/phildaian/status/1116155236433956865
Happy to answer any questions!