Ethereum Has Issues
Ha, Flash Boys 2.0 was from 2019. This blog post is literally "I read a thing from three years ago and have lost faith in something that I never believed in in the first place".<p>As someone who knows and has worked with all the people involved with the write-ups referenced in this blog post, I can pretty confidently say that the author is way way behind here. There have been some insane advancements in recent years that would blow his mind.<p>MEV harvesting is actually an insanely fascinating field of study, and it comes down to consensus in a world where information can only move as fast as the speed of light.<p>Front-running is a general problem where, if you can find out that someone wants to buy something, and can buy it first and sell it to the person who actually want it at a premium. This gets really interesting in the blockchain space, because Miners (Validators) decide the order of transactions, and in some cases validators can be incentivized/coerced to move around transactions in a way that might be beneficial for certain users. This is what is referred to as <i>"Miner Extractable Value"</i>.<p>Yes it's a problem, yes there are mitigations, yes there are fun and weird ways around those mitigations, etc.<p>This is what happens when people are incentivized to take a really good hard look at what global consensus really means. At a high level, most users don't really need to know or care about any of it, but it exists as a parasitic force constantly extracting value from the network. Still, IMO the parasites that feed off MEV are at a significant disadvantage compared with those who feed of legacy financial networks (for more on that, you can read the actual Flash Boys book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Flash-Boys-Wall-Street-Revolt/dp/0393351599/" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/Flash-Boys-Wall-Street-Revolt/dp/0393...</a>).