Comment Re:Bah ... (Score 1, Interesting) 101
Frankly, I see little difference between stealing BitCoins from a mining pool and High Frequency Trading. And that's perfectly legal.
The official stock market justification for HFT is that it provides "liquidity" (that's the actual word they use) to the market. Translated into human-speak, that means that the trading companies get transaction fees for every transaction under HFT and that money is very important to them. Of course the traders don't pay the kind of fees that us normal people pay. They get volume discounts. But the justification is that somehow the HFT fees that get paid benefit all of us by allowing them to lower the fees that we normal people pay for our rare transactions.
After reading the book Fortune's Formula by William Poundstone, I've come to the conclusion that the stock market will always be gamed by those with money and if HFT were banned, they'd just find something to exploit, maybe even worse. I do admit to being amused by this thread because I thought that the advocates were swearing that BitCoin stealing was impossible - too many safeguards you know.