To be fair, the article talks about none of that and focuses on the high-level traders perspective. I'd bet that a write up of the process of the merge would be a huge hit on HN.
I want to have the same faith as you, but I've been here since y2, and it has seldom been positive. I get it, I'm in the same field of research and can't stand what traders have done to the industry.
0. In the beginning we had no legitimacy, so we courted regulators and current financial types in as a means of legitimacy by proxy.
1. Those financial types and regulators who had open minds joined, shenanigans ensued, and we saw a replaying of all the dirty tricks that were outlawed in traditional markets like front-running.
2. Then fast forward to where we are now; industry types who came in early are making a killing and funding legislation like New York's BitLicense, which pushes toward centralization by outlawing participation for 'unaccreddited' types like the nerds who built this whole shindig.
For folks like me who just want to build distributed systems and tackle issues like consensus, it's hard to be taken seriously, because we're all just trying to do our work but we're trapped in this casino where there's starting to be more pinky rings than poker chips and it's only getting worse.
