Remove the informational rent and the crime has nothing to steal
This is Jonathan Hare's account, with its provenance shown. The person or organization named has not yet claimed or corrected it.
Insider trading is not a moral failure that happens to occur in markets. It is the predictable consequence of a market design in which knowing something first is itself worth money.
Where an informational rent exists, someone will collect it. Prohibiting the collection does not remove the rent — it moves the activity into whatever channel the prohibition does not reach, and turns enforcement into a lottery about who gets caught. The Freeman prosecution is a useful illustration: the conduct he pleaded to was, in Jonathan Hare's account of that business, continuous and universal.
Each entry below carries its own provenance — the source, and how it was processed. That is the condition on which this graph can be extended by anyone without degrading.
The trail exists so that people who were there can reconstruct their own memories, recognize what they helped incubate, and add to or correct the record — or forward the few pages that belong to someone they know.
The Exchange does not reward being first to know. It rewards what a contribution actually caused, verified after the fact and settled to whoever made it possible.
That is a different instrument from a price. A price is a compressed signal about the future, and any advantage in forming it is monetisable by whoever holds it. A settlement against verified outcome is not — there is no earlier moment at which to be positioned, because the value is not assigned until the outcome exists.
The arbitrage opportunity does not become illegal. It becomes unavailable. Which is the same move as the milled edge: not a stronger prohibition, an object that cannot be clipped.
This is not a theoretical claim about what financial intermediaries do. It was confirmed to Hare directly, by people from Goldman Sachs, in a room assembled to design the response to the 2008 crisis.
He proposed transparency into the assets underlying these instruments. Their response was not that it would not work. It was: “where do our margins go?” — because superior visibility into the valuation of underlying assets is where the margin comes from.
That is the entire argument of this page, volunteered by the beneficiaries, at the moment of maximum pressure to fix the thing. The rent was not a side effect of the business. It was the business.
Which is why prohibition has never worked and never will. You cannot regulate away a margin without removing what produces it, and nobody whose living depends on it is going to help you. The meeting →
Hare has described this as the Exchange having access to all information about everything. That formulation invites exactly the wrong reading, and the architecture is designed against it.
The asymmetry is not removed by everyone being able to see everything — that is surveillance, and it is what the Quantum Privacy Network exists to make unnecessary. It is removed by making the advantage unmonetisable while the information itself stays sealed. Verification without disclosure is the whole mechanism: a claim can be checked without the underlying fact being revealed to the checker.
So the informational rent disappears without the information becoming public. Those are very different systems and only one of them is being proposed.
Hare's position is that the sector has grown enormous while its center of gravity shifted from allocating capital to extracting positional advantage — making money rather than adding value.
That is not a claim about the character of the people in it. It is a claim about what the design pays for. A great many extremely capable people spend their careers competing to be marginally earlier, because being marginally earlier is where the return is. Change what the return attaches to and the same people go and do something else.
The strongest objection is Grossman-Stiglitz: informationally efficient markets are impossible, because if prices fully reflected all information nobody would have any reason to pay for acquiring it. Some rent has to exist or the information never gets gathered.
The Exchange's answer is that it pays for acquisition directly — contribution recorded, attributed and settled against outcome — rather than indirectly through the price. Whether direct payment can substitute completely for the informational rent, at scale and across every kind of information, is the open question, and this record does not claim it is settled. If it cannot, the argument fails here rather than anywhere else.
There is no single root. This is one view of the graph, from this node — what you see depends on where you enter and what you are looking for.
Goldman's head of risk arbitrage — and the analysis that showed the trades did not fit the accusation
Open →the same move, in silverTamper-evidence built into the substrate, not enforcement applied afterwards
Open →the same claim about what a design pays forBass's model fixes the Spence problem. Then it creates a second one.
Open →the attention-economy versionThe attention economy, reversed — and this site is a running instance of it
Open →whose result the corpus invertsVice Chairman of Consilient, and the introduction into Cisco
Open →where it was confirmed out loudRegulatory Infrastructure for the 21st Century — presented while the meltdown was still happening
Open →This page is the anecdote — the thing that draws you in. The explainers are where the mechanism is set out in full, with the problem it solves and the condition on which it fails.
The mechanism, set out in full with the condition that would defeat it.
Open the explainer →Quantum RecognitionThe mechanism, set out in full with the condition that would defeat it.
Open the explainer →This entry is deliberately incomplete. The gaps below are the things only certain people can settle — and settling one is a contribution like any other: recorded, timestamped and attributed to whoever made it.
Correct anything wrong, add what only you know, or claim this entry as your own. Write to evidence@qpncatalyst.io and Jonathan directly (both are on the button) — a timestamped confirmation comes back with your submission attached, as your own independent record. No account, no permission, no institutional standing required.
Public contributions earn Publicity Premium; bringing others who were there earns Cascade Premium. Everything is valued retrospectively as outcomes verify, so nothing has to be priced up front.
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