A new way to look at markets too?
Thanks to Gordon Cook, I was pointed towards a presentation by Van Jacobsen entitled “A New Way to look at Networking” (Van is a Research Fellow at PARC), here are some highlights taken from his slides:
Data has a name, not a location.
Integrity and trust are derived from the data, not the channel it arrives on.
Anything that moves bits in time or space can and will be used to communicate.
Trust & data integrity are foundation of the design, not an add-on (phishing, pharming, spam, etc., can easily be made impossible.)
The nice properties of dissemination result from making the time & sequence information implicit in a conversation be explicit in a fully qualified name.
Many ad-hoc dissemination overlays have been created (Akami CDN, BitTorrent, Sonos mesh, Apple Rendezvous) – there’s a demonstrated need.
As JP would say, this is truly a provisional post – in the sense that there is a higher chance than usual that I’ve got it very wrong – but his presentation got me to thinking that there might be an analogous leap to be made in how markets are structured and designed, with particularly significant ramifications (risks and opportunities) for financial exchanges and dealers. I’ll leave it like that for now and would be particularly interested to know if anyone else sees a parallel or not and why.
