Timekeeping in Financial Exchanges
&gt; In order to do it, they bored through mountains in Pennsylvania in order to make the path of the wire as straight as possible, reducing the distance information had to travel. In total, the project cost \$300 million. The result? They can send information in 13.3 milliseconds round trip, 3 milliseconds faster than the competition at the time. So we can see that a 3 millisecond edge is worth at least \$300 million.<p>I understand the motivation and rationale and that my take here is subjective, but I take a pause at how sad it is that we&#x27;re literally boring holes through our natural mountains in order to flip bits 3ms faster in the name of high frequency trading.