A penny per share tax is a buck on a round lot trade of 100 shares to kill HFTs. The problem is I don't lose a buck to HFTs but I would lose a buck to the govt. Its just a cheesy stealth taxation plan. Blame the HFTs, rich people suck, horray for the 99% we're gonna destroy HFTs, but the only real end result is the govt takes more of my money. So a transaction tax is a great way to cause a couple orders of magnitude more damage to the economy than HFTs could theoretically ever cause.

This still doesn't explain the fixation on killing HFTs. So they get a "sin" tax. On what sin, exactly? nobody knows.

WRT increasing transaction volume to make more than $1000... Remember that superman movie where Richard Pryor took all the fractional cents out of everyone paycheck, put them in a pile, and kept that substantial amount? Well HFT is like that in trades where a bunch of competing HFTs fight each other to, on long term average, determine the sub-cent price of a share priced in cents, and then, essentially, the HFT who skims off the least amount on top of the sub cent slice beats the greedier HFTs and keeps the extra skim. Well, in the movie, if Richard Pryor wanted more money, he'd have to make more transactions, make more paychecks. But Mr Pryor doesn't get to decide how many times paychecks are written per month (Weekly checks? Daily checks?), or how many people are employed... This tired old hollywood plot was recycled into Office Space, and probably many more movies. There's only like 50 movies, endlessly redone.

Ya ya ya, we all know the old skimming scheme that's become possible because of electronics controlling money. Just because there is a way to manipulate a system, doesn't make it a good thing. 21 is a good (blackjack)movie, but will still get you thrown out of a casino. There's nothing to say that these HFT's aren't skimming money from regular investors and vice-versa. That said though, why does the market exist in the first place? It's not for a bunch of machines to race to the penny.

Think about making a competitive system to determine the sub cent fractional price of shares traded at cent rounded prices. Read the wikipedia article below. You pretty much end up reinventing HFT.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_annealing

I like the idea of a lot of competing HFTs from a lot of companies fighting each other in a race to the bottom to rip me off the least. Worst case is we damage the HFT ecosystem just enough that two companies get all the fractional skim and have no limits on greed because the government helpfully destroyed all the competition for them. Yes. That would be bad.

We (as a country) always make the worst possible decision, so this is probably what we'll implement.

The easiest way to "get rid of" HFT is to fix decimalization. Back when we traded on eights thats too wide to make money on a HFT strategy, and if we allowed millionth of a penny trading quotes that would narrow bid/ask resulting in too little money generated by HFT. Decimalization seems to be almost the perfect pricing system to result in massive HFT strategies, so if you really hate HFT (and WHY?) then just fix the pricing structure so its not profitable anymore. Rather than playing games with legal enforcement of favored or disfavored behavior, simply make disfavored behavior unprofitable. I suppose the opposite solution of going big would work just as well, fine we'll only trade stocks on dollar values now no fractions of a dollar.

Your comment isn't very intelligible. Are you confusing cryptography with computer security, perhaps?

This being /. it's pretty likely he doesn't know. Unfortunately, it's entirely beyond my writing ability to describe getting blown.

That statement does not pertain specifically to mod chips or software, but is a general statement about such goods.

Hardware, batteries, etc that are counterfeit can and have caused injury and death. Counterfeit medicine, vitamins, and supplements have caused sickness and death. Counterfeit toys and children's clothing contain dangerous chemicals, lead based paint, are missing flame retardants, or are made of flammable material.