Author Topic: Front running Decentralized Exchanges: The problem with Augur, Bitshares, Nxt, a  (Read 4393 times)

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Offline Empirical1.2

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Let the market decide how to allocate resources and whether to investigate and engage in social-shaming nodes that do it etc.
+5%
The market will decide regardless, one of my favourite aspects of bts is that inevitabilities are identified and the optimum solution found, rather than fighting and attempting to control how it plays out.

 +5% The market decides. As insider trading and front-running are minority activities that take more value than they return from the majority. All else being equal, the majority historically always choose the market that does the best at excluding these activities.

So you can create a completely free, anything goes market, it will just be less likely to be adopted than a competitor.
« Last Edit: June 28, 2015, 06:45:59 pm by Empirical1.2 »
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Offline arhag

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If there was an easy way to structure information exchange to avoid front-running that would be great. But, I'm not sure if it can be done simply and without other tradeoffs.

The new approach is so much better than BitShares <1.0 where the network itself pesimistically front-runs all order matching.

I agree with this.

I still think that adding the encryption on limit orders so that we can at least ensure all risk-free front running is limited to only the witnesses is an important improvement with little downside. And remember even that would be optional for users. So those users who don't want the slightly larger transaction size to enable that, since they aren't concerned or care about someone front running their order, don't need to take advantage of that extra protection.

Offline Permie

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Let the market decide how to allocate resources and whether to investigate and engage in social-shaming nodes that do it etc.
+5%
The market will decide regardless, one of my favourite aspects of bts is that inevitabilities are identified and the optimum solution found, rather than fighting and attempting to control how it plays out.

Shaming is an important tool, too
Any company/person who uses the services that bts provides is free to do whatever they wish within the bounds of the constitution.
BitShares is a permissionless system and should always stay that way.

Shunning and shaming have long been known to be some of the most effective methods of regulation.

We should encourage a culture of due diligence on new bts services (UIA, PMPA etc), incentivize members to conduct investigative journalism and publicly name and shame scammers, wrongdoers and liars in any easy to search format, so everyone has easy access to information.
There is no physical authority over others in this system. The way to manage the ecosystem is to hurt the profits and reputation of those acting against the social consensus.
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julian1

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Front running is an artificial issue created by those with an entitlement attitude.


+5%

If there was an easy way to structure information exchange to avoid front-running that would be great. But, I'm not sure if it can be done simply and without other tradeoffs.

The new approach is so much better than BitShares <1.0 where the network itself pesimistically front-runs all order matching.

Let the market decide how to allocate resources and whether to investigate and engage in social-shaming nodes that do it  etc.

Offline puppies

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I think 2 second block times will help mitigate this risk. 

It also shouldn't be too hard to watch out for witnesses that are including transactions the rest of the network hasn't seen.  This would at least force witnesses that want to front run to broadcast their transaction before including it in a block, and limit the witness advantage to the transaction ordering within the block.

Perhaps a rule that transactions process in order of largest to smallest, or something like that could take away the last advantage a witness would have over any other node.
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Offline monsterer

So if someone steals from you tough luck. Get better locks.

Hardly. The best price algorithm gives you at worst what you asked for, and at best a discount equal to the orders available in the book you observed when you placed the order.
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Offline Empirical1.2

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Front running is an artificial issue created by those with an entitlement attitude.   They want everyone to be "equal" and believe that just because they see an order book they are automatically entitled to get their order in. 

If you remove any sense of entitlement from the equation, then what you have are a set of rules where the profits go to those who can react the fastest.   Some people are just jealous of others who seem to get "free money" simply by being fast.   But this is not the case.  Front runners are competing against each other and are still exposed to market risk. 

Let those who are able pick up pennies in front of a steamroller and don't hate them for their speed.   They provide liquidity and the profits they earn help everyone.


ASIC Mining is an artificial issue created by those with an entitlement attitude.   They want everyone to be "equal" and believe that just because they see a block reward they are automatically entitled to a fair shot at it.

If you remove any sense of entitlement from the equation, then what you have are a set of rules where the profits go to those who can mine the fastest.   Some people are just jealous of ASIC miners who seem to get "free money" simply by being fast.   But this is not the case.  ASIC miners are competing against each other and are still exposed to market risk. 

Let miners who are able pick up pennies in front of a steamroller and don't hate them for their speed.   They provide security and the profits they earn help everyone.

So if someone steals from you tough luck. Get better locks.

Just create a system that excludes them. It's the investors and traders that make the market and though I'm not a big trader personally, nearly all seem to agree that front-runners don't provide enough additional value in the form of liquidity to compensate for the value they take.
« Last Edit: June 28, 2015, 11:14:47 am by Empirical1.2 »
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Offline toast

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Front running is an artificial issue created by those with an entitlement attitude.   They want everyone to be "equal" and believe that just because they see an order book they are automatically entitled to get their order in. 

If you remove any sense of entitlement from the equation, then what you have are a set of rules where the profits go to those who can react the fastest.   Some people are just jealous of others who seem to get "free money" simply by being fast.   But this is not the case.  Front runners are competing against each other and are still exposed to market risk. 

Let those who are able pick up pennies in front of a steamroller and don't hate them for their speed.   They provide liquidity and the profits they earn help everyone.

I agree with the general response against criticisms of front-running. I think the argument here, though, is that witnesses running this algorithm are analogous to a centralized exchange transparently front-running everyone, which is still bad because information providers have no incentive to contribute (so you better hope your witnesses are either ALL not greedy, or are great traders on their own). Traders will go where they can make more money.
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Offline Pheonike

So if someone steals from you tough luck. Get better locks.

Offline monsterer

Let those who are able pick up pennies in front of a steamroller and don't hate them for their speed.   They provide liquidity and the profits they earn help everyone.

 +5%
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Offline bytemaster

Front running is an artificial issue created by those with an entitlement attitude.   They want everyone to be "equal" and believe that just because they see an order book they are automatically entitled to get their order in. 

If you remove any sense of entitlement from the equation, then what you have are a set of rules where the profits go to those who can react the fastest.   Some people are just jealous of others who seem to get "free money" simply by being fast.   But this is not the case.  Front runners are competing against each other and are still exposed to market risk. 

Let those who are able pick up pennies in front of a steamroller and don't hate them for their speed.   They provide liquidity and the profits they earn help everyone.   
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Offline Permie

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Front running is a bogus issue to begin with. 


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It's a bit different when the only entities able to front run are those effectively running the exchange. (Witnesses).

For further analysis and possible solutions (or at least ways of mitigating the front running) check out this post I made a few months back:
https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,13831.msg180101.html#msg180101

 +5% Worth reading

Here is BM's response to the ideas discussed in the above thread:
This is all very interesting, but perhaps we are over-thinking this too much.

- front running is only one form of market manipulation, the current order forms *SLOW DOWN* people wishing to move the market which gives everyone a chance to react.

- someone is going to make the money from timing attacks we can go ahead and "let them" make it.  To the average guy he might sometimes get a better deal, but certainly wouldn't get any worse deal. 

So if you want a more traditional order then it may not matter all that much.   

So now all you need to do is identify the means of establishing who gets the benefit of the overlap (buyer or seller)... throw in a small spread for the network and it could be very "traditional" with all of the problems of a traditional system.   Let the "experts" milk inefficiencies.

Just a thought.
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Offline karnal

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Offline sittingduck

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Front running is a bogus issue to begin with. 


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Offline arhag

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He proposes the solution BitShares uses (paying trusted block builders who must maintain a good reputation) but doesn't attribute it to BitShares.

The way it works in BitShares still has flaws. For one, the important market information (such as amounts and limit price) are not encrypted. Anyone in the network passing your transaction around can see it and attempt to front run you (although it is more difficult to do that reliably than as a block producer). The fix to that is simple. You encrypt those sensitive values with a random key and include the hash of that random key as part of the signed transaction. The transaction included in the block is only valid if it has the necessary signatures and the random key that hashes to the included hash value (which thus allows anyone to decrypt the sensitive values). The random value would also be encrypted for any of the witnesses who are expected to include it into their blocks (one or more) and attached along with the signed transaction as part of the transaction bundle that is passed around in the p2p network. This means that those selected witnesses act as the trusted arbiter for that limit order, and thus they are the only ones who could front run if they choose to.

Now we can argue that we trust these witnesses because we voted them in and their future income depends on their reputation. The problem is that only works if they can get caught. Getting caught is easy with double signing blocks. It is not easy with front running. If we only select a small number of witnesses (say 2 consecutive witnesses) to share the random key with for each limit order, and because the witness order is shuffled each round, one may think that allows the opportunity for statistical analysis to determine if a particular witness is front running. The problem is that there is no way to distinguish between that and someone who is just trying to frame that particular witness to get them voted out. So we couldn't rely on statistical analysis to keep witnesses honest under this particular anti-front-running strategy.

However, I discuss ways that we could do better than that in the post that I linked to.