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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

• otterley 5y ago
  Can you elaborate on some of these “insane advancements”?
  • crazypython 5y ago
    It means they worked on it and acknowledge it now. The fundamental problem is still very much there.
    • repomies69 5y ago
      That sounds insance
  • px43 5y ago
    Flashbots gets a minor mention in the article, but it doesn't do justice to how huge the Flashbots ecosystem has gotten: https://docs.flashbots.net https://docs.flashbots.net To be fair, there isn't a ton of information widely available, because talking about Flashbots in public is considered "alpha leakage". You see glimpses on Twitter, Discord, Twitch, etc though. Every once in a while someone will dump their finder code to burn alpha when they get squeezed out of some opportunity set. People have spent years fine tuning bots looking for MEV opportunities, and they have gotten really really good. It also plays a ton into cross-bridge arbitrage, taking advantage of quirks in the interchain ecosystem to squeeze out opportunities. Like I said, the author has dipped their big toe into the MEV rabbit hole, but it goes so, so much deeper.
    • yunohn 5y ago
      > Like I said, the author has dipped their big toe into the MEV rabbit hole, but it goes so, so much deeper. So, both you and GP are saying that MEV is a bigger problem than this article says?
• nurettin 5y ago
  > This gets really interesting in the blockchain space, because Miners (Validators) decide the order of transactions Traders use exchanges. I always thought *coin transactions are too slow to execute at trading speeds, so exchanges somehow buffer transactions using their own pools without ever sending your request to the network at large.
• toolz 5y ago
  Do we have to accept that MEV is a problem? Just because it's been a tactic used in the shadows with traditional finance doesn't mean it's a problem in an open ecosystem where anyone willing to pay can play. There isn't some shadow elite funding a central government here lobbying for restrictive legislation to keep competition at arms length. In my opinion the crypto ecosystem in general is much more understanding and capable of finding ways to distribute information and trust, which prevents this from becoming a bad thing like we see in traditional finance.
  • lukeramsden 5y ago
    > Do we have to accept that MEV is a problem? Yes and no. On the one hand, one does have to accept that "MEV" in the "_Maximum_ extractable value" is always going to be potentially present on a public blockchain - but often times, this is a good thing. Liquidity pool arbitrage is also "MEV", but is MEV that is absolutely vital to efficient markets, and the more advanced the players in that game get, the more everybody gets to enjoy liquid and efficient markets. On the other hand, more and more DeFi projects take in to consideration possible MEV extraction vectors when designing applications, and some even use "MEV protection" as a USP (such as CoWswap)
  • w_TF 5y ago
    Something that rarely gets addressed in these discussions is why Ethereum even has fee market to begin with instead of a cheap FIFO model which ideally would be more fair. To answer that I would invite anyone to try using a blockchain under heavy load without any way for users to prioritize transactions. What you will find is the network becomes vulnerable to transaction spamming; possibly to point of breaking consensus making it so nobody can transact at all. MEV is a consequence of a design decision to address this. And that's not to say Ethereum has everything figured out and a better FIFO model can't solve this, but afaik this is the current state of things.
    • 99112000 5y ago
      FIFO? First in first out? The blockchain is essentially the timestamping machine. The timestamp of a transaction are untrusted until mined into blocks, even then a fork can rid them. The blockchain is essentially solving the ordering problem, one big timestamp machine. The solution you propose would require a timestamp machine in the first place lol.
• sl3232323 5y ago
• Geee 5y ago
  The referenced paper is dated 29 March 2022. https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.15930 https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.15930
• _Nat_ 5y ago
  > 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. Looks like they link a lot of stuff from the past month. Examples of links in the article from within the last month: 1. https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.15930 https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.15930 2. https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2022/04/04/if-you-want-a-scalable-ethereum-blockchain-then-pnp/ https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2022/04/04/if-you-want-... 3. https://datafinnovation.medium.com/the-consequences-of-scalable-blockchains-8c4d23c6af4d https://datafinnovation.medium.com/the-consequences-of-scala... 4. https://web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=2022-04-05-0 https://web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=2022-04-05-0 5. https://ethresear.ch/t/np-completeness-of-a-strong-form-of-scalability/12307 https://ethresear.ch/t/np-completeness-of-a-strong-form-of-s...
  • aaaaaaaaata 5y ago
    If it's published, it's already lost alpha to the publisher, in 90%+ of cases.
• throwaway82652 5y ago
  >it comes down to consensus in a world where information can only move as fast as the speed of light. Yes and now you're circling back around to the usual problems with algorithmic high-frequency trading talked about in Flash Boys, which has nothing to do with blockchains or cryptocurrency. Unless you can cite some "insane advancement" in consensus algorithms that solves these problems everywhere then I doubt there is much more that can be said here. Because AFAICT everything you're talking about is just piling more mitigations and edge cases on top of an existing consensus algorithm. That work is important and it needs to happen on any distributed system. It's not some kind of world-changing thing, it's just necessary maintenance (and cost) to keep the system going. >This is what happens when people are incentivized to take a really good hard look at what global consensus really means. They were already incentivized to do that without blockchains. This sentence could be more accurately stated: This is what happens when people deploy an experimental solution that claims to solve global consensus, but as we find out from experience that it actually doesn't, in some ways it actually makes it worse, and generally speaking those problems are still just as hard as ever.
  • tornato7 5y ago
    There are actually some insane advancements coming out in the form of zero-knowledge order books, Dusk Network being the most well known. It essentially removes frontrunning as a possibility because buyers and sellers are matched using ZK proofs, but are not able to see any orders before they are matched.
    • throwaway82652 5y ago
      That sounds good for any kind of HFT platform matching buyers and sellers. I don't see how that is an "insane advancement" or has anything to do with blockchains.
      • pazimzadeh 5y ago
        Because the miner wouldn't be able to see the order book?..
• FabHK 5y ago
  > 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". No, this blog post is "Look, here, several papers from last month showing there are still massive problems (that were presaged accurately in papers from three years ago)." (and it's not literally that, of course. Why do people use "literally" to mean not literally?) > Still, IMO the parasites that feed off MEV are at a significant disadvantage compared with those who feed of legacy financial networks. Well, fortunately one can regulate these financial networks, right? Well, the legacy ones at least.
  • mw888 5y ago
    And you can’t regulate crypto? How did China do it? Would it somehow be harder when it’s so transparent? Of course not. Anyways you have only a surface level understanding of the post and crypto currencies if you think the way forward is not a technological advancement. People outside the space seem to discover these issues and think that those in it aren’t acutely aware and working on them, which they are.
    • FabHK 5y ago
      Yeah, you can regulate crypto. But then, what's the point? Just have a permissioned regulated blockchain, without all that Proof of Waste nonsense.
• calsy 5y ago
  Saying insane a lot, pretty confident, and cherry picking some text to 'literally' dismiss the entire blog post with a single sentence that just serves to validate your flimsy reasoning doesn't make a good argument.
• akyu 5y ago
  A unsolved problem from three years ago is still an unsolved problem. And you don't actually rebuke any of his claims, you just give a poor summary of MEV.
• yunohn 5y ago
  > Still, IMO the parasites that feed off MEV are at a significant disadvantage compared with those who feed of legacy financial networks Literally whataboutism.
• uncomputation 5y ago
  I think you’re over-exaggerating about the “insane advancements in recent years that would blow his mind.” There was a recent overview of different MEV preventive measures [0] which came to the conclusion that there is currently no silver bullet. This is still a large and unsolved issue with competing mitigations with large drawbacks, far from any “insane advancements.” You make a good point that these algorithmic trading techniques are not as big of a deal for everyday users though, and mostly bot wars. [0]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2203.11520.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2203.11520.pdf