On 5/3/25 23:40, Richard Aiken - raikenclw at gmail.com (via tml list)
wrote:
> I can only very vaguely follow this discussion. But it does occur to
> me that someone with comm gear a tech level or two higher than a given
> planet could REALLY play that planet's stock markets like a fiddle.
> The soundtrack to The Sting [that old movie with Robert Redford as the
> conman] is now playing in my head. :)

To a limit imposed by signals traversing free space (eg neutrino or
meson comms) at c, definitely.

This is an example of a situation where _latency_ (round-trip time) is
way more critical than bandwidth (how much you can stuff into the
pipe).  Bandwidth's upper bound is _considerably_ looser than latency's
lower bound - IIRC, we're about 40 orders of magnitude short of hitting
upper bounds on bandwidth.

Going back to your suggestion, Richard, frinstance - a pre-telegraph
planet, and Messrs Dodgie with Frikkin' Laser Beams arbitraging the news.

On a planet with equivalent-to-OTL tech, and Messrs Notdodgie with
neutrino comms - the absolute difference in latency between speed of
light in fibre-optics going around the planet's surface and a straight
shot through part of the planet at c is a lot less than in the previous
case (measured in milliseconds), but there's more money to be made
arbitraging all sorts of things.

By contrast, on a planet where neutrino comms are widespread, there's
very little, if any, latency to be gained by using meson comms - it
would depend on the actual physical processes involved in generating,
trasmitting, receiving and decoding the data.

Richard, is that some of what you were getting at?

Alex