8 ms·

Flashbots

151 points by donmezgel 4y ago

weeeee 4y ago
clickbait title. the network doesn’t need flashbots to function, it can produce blocks if it goes down.
donmezgel 4y ago
In Ethereum, as of May 2022, it is believed that over 90% of miners are connected to the Flashbots server. One can determine this by observing that over 90% of blocks contain Flashbot transaction bundles. Adoption from 0% to around 90% occurred almost entirely within 2021. Flashbots is a single centralised entity. It is funded by Fred Ehrsam’s crypto VC firm Paradigm, although it appears that this funding could be altruistic. Searchers send there MEV transactions to the server with the address https://relay.flashbots.net/ https://relay.flashbots.net/ and the server is currently located in Ohio in the United States of America.
- downvotetruth 4y ago
  flashbots faq seems out of date as relay.flashbots.net resolves to 104.26.10.65 & isp = Cloudflare in San Francisco
  - latchkey 4y ago
    The backend could still be in Ohio. Just fronted by CF. Which is centralized.
  - giancarlostoro 4y ago
    On port 80 that makes sense, but is the actual relay on port 80? Or is it a web API? If the latter then I am not surprised they chose to put CloudFlare on top of it.
    - danuker 4y ago
      I see a JSON error straight on HTTPS. Must be an API directly. But HTTPS is 443, not 80. The fact that Cloudflare was privy to all Ethereum ecosystem communication with flashbots gives me the heebie jeebies.
      - giancarlostoro 4y ago
        Yeah had a bit of a brainfart there about port I really just meant presence on the web…
    - moralestapia 4y ago
      Domains resolve to the same IP disregarding port number.
      - giancarlostoro 4y ago
        Unless you have the really expensive TCP proxy from CloudFlare it is typically only used on web protocols.
        moralestapia 4y ago
        Yeah, I kept thinking about it after writing my comment ... "Well, but maybe if you ..." But I've never seen it in the wild.
DanAtC 4y ago
- sam1r 4y ago
  10% decentralized. But hey, something is better than nothing.
  - cammikebrown 4y ago
    10% decentralized = centralized
  - jstx1 4y ago
    In a system with majority voting 90-10 is as good as 100-0.
    - ChadNauseam 4y ago
      luckily this has nothing to do with majority voting
    - NavinF 4y ago
      > In a system with majority voting Why troll with non sequiturs?
  - dna_polymerase 4y ago
    If you took the time to read the article instead of posting stupid replies you would know that Flashbots was a mere add-on. Nothing the network ever relied on.
yuan43 4y ago
> Therefore, block producers and searchers require complex systems similar to those of a sophisticated trading house, like Alameda Research or Jump for example. This can therefore result in significant centralisation pressures for block producers, with smaller less sophisticated block producers being unable to compete. I want to make sure I have this straight. The "therefore" in this paragraph refers to how miners "require" a way to front-run orders, bets, and other transactions made on the network lest they fall behind their peers in the mining arms race. The article calls this "Miner Extractable Value" or MEV. So the centralization pressure from Flashbot comes from miners front-running "DeFi" (decentralized finance) players. > The Flashbots system is integrated into the current Proof of Work (PoW) mining system on Ethereum. When the Merge happens and PoW mining is switched off, Flashbots adoption will reset to zero again. In order to mitigate against the MEV problem a new Flashbots infrastructure will need to be built up and staking agents will need to adopt this new system. This was not in the ETH 2.0 roadmap and may be an additional complication related to the upgrade to ETH 2.0. This part is not as clear. How does the MEV landscape change in post-merge Ethereum?
- latchkey 4y ago
  > How does the MEV landscape change in post-merge Ethereum? The way that transactions are bundled is no longer done by mining pools and block construction has the ability to be outsourced. I personally, think they should have shipped with this, but I'd expect this to get rolled into a future release. https://github.com/flashbots/mev-boost https://github.com/flashbots/mev-boost
  - mgraczyk 4y ago
    Just to make this clear, the MEV problem and centralization pressure is still there, it's just been temporarily disrupted. Like you said, this can be fixed more easily now but hasn't yet.
    - latchkey 4y ago
      The centralization issue of block formation has been made, temporarily, worse with the switch to PoS [0]. I expect them to clear this up in the future. Introducing mev-boost now would have likely caused delays in the merge and at some point, you just have to make the switch and fix things later, which is what they did. [0] https://twitter.com/koeppelmann/status/1570436882483523585 https://twitter.com/koeppelmann/status/1570436882483523585
scubakid 4y ago
latchkey 4y ago
This isn't quite what it says it is. This is also pre-merge. Mining pools, not miners, connected to the flashbots mempool to pick up their transactions. There can be many mempools and mempools don't need to talk to each other. It was in the benefit for the miners for pools to do this (ie: their customers), so all the big ones did it. By doing so, miners would earn extra value (aka: MEV) from these transactions because flashbots would bundle them up and order them. If you wanted to be at the top of the list with your transactions, you'd pay a bit more. The really centralized bit of this is that flashbots actually can be turned on/off [0], which I find rather inexcusable. [0] https://twitter.com/TimBeiko/status/1570435474535354368 https://twitter.com/TimBeiko/status/1570435474535354368
tyrust 4y ago
> In Ethereum, as of May 2022, it is believed that over 90% of miners are connected to the Flashbots server. One can determine this by observing that over 90% of blocks contain Flashbot transaction bundles. > The Flashbots system is integrated into the current Proof of Work (PoW) mining system on Ethereum. When the Merge happens and PoW mining is switched off, Flashbots adoption will reset to zero again. This article is kind of dated at this point.
- michaelwww 4y ago
  > We go on to look at ETH 2.0 and explain why Flashbots or a similar system needs to be constructed again from scratch. I read it as what was and now what is needed
  - 0x64 4y ago
    Mev-boost, a piece of software that consensus clients delegate their block building to, is currently being used on mainnet. The difference is that there can be multiple block builder _relays_, such as Flashbots, bloXroute, Manifold Finance, and Blocknative. These relays effectively accept bundles from MEV searchers, which are then sent to the validator running mev-boost as they propose their block. https://boost.flashbots.net/ https://boost.flashbots.net/
anony23 4y ago
Afaik, just because miners choose to accept flashbots bundles doesn't mean they don't also accept mempool transactions. This isn't mutually exclusive, is it?
zeroclip 4y ago
The title might be misleading to those not well versed with how block production works. > [flashbots] is not, strictly speaking, a necessary component of the block production process. The centralised Flashbots relay entity does not directly own any hashpower. Nor can Flashbots censor non-MEV related transactions. Miners can still include transactions that did not go through the Flashbots relay. This is also likely to change as MEV Boost relay code was recently open sourced to accelerate and promote more relay diversity. https://www.theblock.co/amp/post/164152/flashbots-to-hasten-open-sourcing-of-its-mev-boost-relay-code https://www.theblock.co/amp/post/164152/flashbots-to-hasten-...
realitysballs 4y ago
Now Irrelevant
encryptluks2 4y ago
Whatever happened to the decentralization concept of every user being a node? Like not just computers but apps for phones too, so in order to use it you also have to share some resources in return. Is BitTorrent really the closest thing to decentralization?
- latchkey 4y ago
  There is still a plan for that, but it has required a lot of R&D and 'invention' of new techniques. Read up on Verkle trees [0]. That said, the plan is to basically prune the database and not keep history of what each wallet balance was at a certain block. This storage is going to be pushed off to indexers that want to provide it as a service. I'm not sure that is a good or bad thing, but it'll enable the future you're talking about since we do not have infinite storage/bandwidth on our small devices. [0] https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/06/18/verkle.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/06/18/verkle.html
- rvz 4y ago
  The moment you have to stake 32 ETH to be a validator, it was already made highly inaccessible for most. As soon as that node ends up running on AWS rather than a user’s typical laptop as suggested by Vitalik and his friends, then that was another decentralization failure there and there is no self-hosting at home. Finally, when the merge was finalized, there where only two addresses that ended up holding more than 48% of Ethereum that is used for the PoS mechanism to work. Another centralization risk feared that happened in reality. So, that looks to me like a failure of decentralization and a more centralized system that as expected; made worse with Proof of Stake.
Animats 4y ago
Hm. Have the economics changed? In a proof of work system, you have to operate a mining farm, using hardware and power. In the new proof of stake system, you just have to operate a validator, which is cheap, and own lots of ETH. So, while there are advantages to front-running, there's not as much cost pressure to do it. The motivations of miners and HODLers are different.
- siftrics 4y ago
  >there's not as much cost pressure to do it This is false. You never had to run a validator to watch the mempool and do MEV.
hash07e 4y ago
So lets talk it straight. The merge killed the thing that keep ETH DE-centralized. Now who owns more ETH has more power... Like centralized finance.. instead of Defi.
- zeroclip 4y ago
  This post was from before the merge to proof of stake.
- vvpan 4y ago
  > Now who owns more ETH has more power... I would argue that that is false. Nobody can approve invalid transactions or maliciously alter the state of the chain. So in that sense, no they do not have more power.
TobyTheDog123 4y ago
ITT: People see a crypto-based headline and write smarmy, reddit-tier, bad-faith comments about something they know nothing about, and don't desire to know anything about. I can see it's already starting.
benreesman 4y ago
Semi-aside: the term “front running” is pretty overloaded and more than a little charged at this point. It gets applied to a whole spectrum of activities from the socially positive (racing to the inside with a post-only limit order to minimize the still positive price improvement) to the murky and probably kind of shady (MEV ecosystem) to outright fraud (an agency execution firm literally loading up before executing a client’s block, intentionally mispricing an IPO). I would submit that it’s probably best just avoided by anyone who’s objective is clear communication. It’s still great for ruckus-making, but that’s probably more of a bug than a feature on HN. FWIW I’m also very skeptical of modern MEV-world. I just think “front running” is a bad term for anything these days.
- ISL 4y ago
  Came here to write the same. I'm real happy when someone runs ahead of my limit orders and provides me liquidity/execution. If I wanted to pay less, I would have set the limit lower.
  - pcthrowaway 4y ago
    You can set a slippage tolerance when you make an order on a decentralized exchange. It's basically the same as a limit order priced to market, where you effectively set the "most you're willing to buy for" / "least you're willing to sell for" and occasionally get better rates. With a DEX your transaction might just not execute at all some of the time of creating the transaction, so you might burn a transaction, and there's no orderbook for the order to sit in til later.
- biolotthek 4y ago
  What you call socially positive others may call execution cost. Because you might improve on a pension fund limit order. So it's best to not get into this territory.
  - benreesman 4y ago
    A non-aggressing order (I'll use post-only limit as an example, but as you probably know there are a zillion kinds of PoL and IOC and flags and stuff that meet this criteria) strictly makes the book deeper, or narrower, or both. A pension fund (or rather the agency execution-type firm that they'd be crazy not to employ for block trades) wants deep books and narrow spreads: if they were in the business of collecting maker rebates then they'd be market makers, which would make them terrible pension fund managers. If their agency execution firm is able to shave a bit of slippage/friction off by leaving some passive orders in the book I suppose they might have some luck with that, but there's no way that punishing retail traders with wider spreads on the off chance that an agency execution firm has to have a socially-approved client is a net win under any definition of socially positive. Execution cost for non-advanced actors is wide spreads, shallow insides, and high fees: strict market makers improve all of that. People who make arguments like this one are usually day traders with no business using limit orders. I'm not saying that's what you are, but that's usually where you hear it: certainly to the extent that this argument has an intellectual pedigree other than that awful Lewis book, that's it.
viraptor 4y ago
While technically correct, this post is such a gaslight exercise. It boils down to: Frontrunning is profitable and bad for the system. So let's discuss our totally trusted system optimising the frontrunning. It's good for everyone, promise. Just don't ask about the impact on the transaction throughput and fees that comes from those transactions existing in the first place. And don't google rent seeking. Remember optimising a bad thing is good, because it's a local minimum, so let's make sure to restore it in eth2!
danuker 4y ago
And that server was: Cloudflare: https://relay.flashbots.net/ https://relay.flashbots.net/
adv0r 4y ago
as of today, only 21% ( 90537 of 429393) of validators are connected to one single server. source: the single server https://boost-relay.flashbots.net/ https://boost-relay.flashbots.net/ We are in mev-boost infancy and there are already 8 relay to chose from, beside home-building of blocks.
nothrowaways 4y ago
Single point of failure
- everfree 4y ago
  It's actually not a single point of failure, there's a graceful fallback where the client builds a block locally.
lazzlazzlazz 4y ago
This is a deeply misleading headline. Other people have explained it as well, but Flashbots is a relay for transmitting transactions to the Ethereum network in a way that preserves their privacy (and exposure to something called MEV[1]). It's purely optional and the vast majority of transactions[2] do not actually pass through this relay. MEV is an interesting area of research[3]. Unrelated aside: why is the quality of Hacker News posts and comments on crypto so bad? I experience extreme Gell-Mann amnesia[4] almost every post I read. This is the industry I work in and the amount of misinformation produced and spread on Hacker News is absurd. [1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.05234 https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.05234 [2]: https://explore.flashbots.net https://explore.flashbots.net [3]: https://flashbots.notion.site/flashbots/mev-day-836f88806995412dabc1c7bb7ce4e830 https://flashbots.notion.site/flashbots/mev-day-836f88806995... [4]: https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2021/01/18/gell-mann-amnesia/ https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2021/01/18/gell-mann-amnesia/
- biolotthek 4y ago
- codehalo 4y ago
  > Unrelated aside: why is the quality of Hacker News posts and comments on crypto so bad? I experience extreme Gell-Mann amnesia[4] almost every post I read. It's because the posters think they are smart. With every passing day that cryptocurrencies become adopted/accepted, their smartness becomes questionable, even to themselves. For them, it is easier to double down on the flawed arguments - well over 10 years now - than accept that while they are smart in some areas, they are not in all.
seba_dos1 4y ago
Somewhat counterintuitively, PoW is inherently centralized. Its properties that make it viable at all also make it easy to become controlled by small number of big actors. This is hardly specific to Ethereum.

151 points by donmezgel 4y ago

clickbait title. the network doesn’t need flashbots to function, it can produce blocks if it goes down.

In Ethereum, as of May 2022, it is believed that over 90% of miners are connected to the Flashbots server. One can determine this by observing that over 90% of blocks contain Flashbot transaction bundles. Adoption from 0% to around 90% occurred almost entirely within 2021. Flashbots is a single centralised entity. It is funded by Fred Ehrsam’s crypto VC firm Paradigm, although it appears that this funding could be altruistic. Searchers send there MEV transactions to the server with the address https://relay.flashbots.net/ https://relay.flashbots.net/ and the server is currently located in Ohio in the United States of America.

downvotetruth 4y ago
flashbots faq seems out of date as relay.flashbots.net resolves to 104.26.10.65 & isp = Cloudflare in San Francisco
- latchkey 4y ago
  The backend could still be in Ohio. Just fronted by CF. Which is centralized.
- giancarlostoro 4y ago
  On port 80 that makes sense, but is the actual relay on port 80? Or is it a web API? If the latter then I am not surprised they chose to put CloudFlare on top of it.
  - danuker 4y ago
    I see a JSON error straight on HTTPS. Must be an API directly. But HTTPS is 443, not 80. The fact that Cloudflare was privy to all Ethereum ecosystem communication with flashbots gives me the heebie jeebies.
    - giancarlostoro 4y ago
      Yeah had a bit of a brainfart there about port I really just meant presence on the web…
  - moralestapia 4y ago
    Domains resolve to the same IP disregarding port number.
    - giancarlostoro 4y ago
      Unless you have the really expensive TCP proxy from CloudFlare it is typically only used on web protocols.
      - moralestapia 4y ago
        Yeah, I kept thinking about it after writing my comment ... "Well, but maybe if you ..." But I've never seen it in the wild.

DanAtC 4y ago

sam1r 4y ago
10% decentralized. But hey, something is better than nothing.
- cammikebrown 4y ago
  10% decentralized = centralized
- jstx1 4y ago
  In a system with majority voting 90-10 is as good as 100-0.
  - ChadNauseam 4y ago
    luckily this has nothing to do with majority voting
  - NavinF 4y ago
    > In a system with majority voting Why troll with non sequiturs?
- dna_polymerase 4y ago
  If you took the time to read the article instead of posting stupid replies you would know that Flashbots was a mere add-on. Nothing the network ever relied on.

yuan43 4y ago

> Therefore, block producers and searchers require complex systems similar to those of a sophisticated trading house, like Alameda Research or Jump for example. This can therefore result in significant centralisation pressures for block producers, with smaller less sophisticated block producers being unable to compete. I want to make sure I have this straight. The "therefore" in this paragraph refers to how miners "require" a way to front-run orders, bets, and other transactions made on the network lest they fall behind their peers in the mining arms race. The article calls this "Miner Extractable Value" or MEV. So the centralization pressure from Flashbot comes from miners front-running "DeFi" (decentralized finance) players. > The Flashbots system is integrated into the current Proof of Work (PoW) mining system on Ethereum. When the Merge happens and PoW mining is switched off, Flashbots adoption will reset to zero again. In order to mitigate against the MEV problem a new Flashbots infrastructure will need to be built up and staking agents will need to adopt this new system. This was not in the ETH 2.0 roadmap and may be an additional complication related to the upgrade to ETH 2.0. This part is not as clear. How does the MEV landscape change in post-merge Ethereum?

latchkey 4y ago
> How does the MEV landscape change in post-merge Ethereum? The way that transactions are bundled is no longer done by mining pools and block construction has the ability to be outsourced. I personally, think they should have shipped with this, but I'd expect this to get rolled into a future release. https://github.com/flashbots/mev-boost https://github.com/flashbots/mev-boost
- mgraczyk 4y ago
  Just to make this clear, the MEV problem and centralization pressure is still there, it's just been temporarily disrupted. Like you said, this can be fixed more easily now but hasn't yet.
  - latchkey 4y ago
    The centralization issue of block formation has been made, temporarily, worse with the switch to PoS [0]. I expect them to clear this up in the future. Introducing mev-boost now would have likely caused delays in the merge and at some point, you just have to make the switch and fix things later, which is what they did. [0] https://twitter.com/koeppelmann/status/1570436882483523585 https://twitter.com/koeppelmann/status/1570436882483523585

scubakid 4y ago

latchkey 4y ago

This isn't quite what it says it is. This is also pre-merge. Mining pools, not miners, connected to the flashbots mempool to pick up their transactions. There can be many mempools and mempools don't need to talk to each other. It was in the benefit for the miners for pools to do this (ie: their customers), so all the big ones did it. By doing so, miners would earn extra value (aka: MEV) from these transactions because flashbots would bundle them up and order them. If you wanted to be at the top of the list with your transactions, you'd pay a bit more. The really centralized bit of this is that flashbots actually can be turned on/off [0], which I find rather inexcusable. [0] https://twitter.com/TimBeiko/status/1570435474535354368 https://twitter.com/TimBeiko/status/1570435474535354368

tyrust 4y ago

> In Ethereum, as of May 2022, it is believed that over 90% of miners are connected to the Flashbots server. One can determine this by observing that over 90% of blocks contain Flashbot transaction bundles. > The Flashbots system is integrated into the current Proof of Work (PoW) mining system on Ethereum. When the Merge happens and PoW mining is switched off, Flashbots adoption will reset to zero again. This article is kind of dated at this point.

michaelwww 4y ago
> We go on to look at ETH 2.0 and explain why Flashbots or a similar system needs to be constructed again from scratch. I read it as what was and now what is needed
- 0x64 4y ago
  Mev-boost, a piece of software that consensus clients delegate their block building to, is currently being used on mainnet. The difference is that there can be multiple block builder _relays_, such as Flashbots, bloXroute, Manifold Finance, and Blocknative. These relays effectively accept bundles from MEV searchers, which are then sent to the validator running mev-boost as they propose their block. https://boost.flashbots.net/ https://boost.flashbots.net/

anony23 4y ago

Afaik, just because miners choose to accept flashbots bundles doesn't mean they don't also accept mempool transactions. This isn't mutually exclusive, is it?

zeroclip 4y ago

The title might be misleading to those not well versed with how block production works. > [flashbots] is not, strictly speaking, a necessary component of the block production process. The centralised Flashbots relay entity does not directly own any hashpower. Nor can Flashbots censor non-MEV related transactions. Miners can still include transactions that did not go through the Flashbots relay. This is also likely to change as MEV Boost relay code was recently open sourced to accelerate and promote more relay diversity. https://www.theblock.co/amp/post/164152/flashbots-to-hasten-open-sourcing-of-its-mev-boost-relay-code https://www.theblock.co/amp/post/164152/flashbots-to-hasten-...

realitysballs 4y ago

Now Irrelevant

encryptluks2 4y ago

Whatever happened to the decentralization concept of every user being a node? Like not just computers but apps for phones too, so in order to use it you also have to share some resources in return. Is BitTorrent really the closest thing to decentralization?

latchkey 4y ago
There is still a plan for that, but it has required a lot of R&D and 'invention' of new techniques. Read up on Verkle trees [0]. That said, the plan is to basically prune the database and not keep history of what each wallet balance was at a certain block. This storage is going to be pushed off to indexers that want to provide it as a service. I'm not sure that is a good or bad thing, but it'll enable the future you're talking about since we do not have infinite storage/bandwidth on our small devices. [0] https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/06/18/verkle.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/06/18/verkle.html
rvz 4y ago
The moment you have to stake 32 ETH to be a validator, it was already made highly inaccessible for most. As soon as that node ends up running on AWS rather than a user’s typical laptop as suggested by Vitalik and his friends, then that was another decentralization failure there and there is no self-hosting at home. Finally, when the merge was finalized, there where only two addresses that ended up holding more than 48% of Ethereum that is used for the PoS mechanism to work. Another centralization risk feared that happened in reality. So, that looks to me like a failure of decentralization and a more centralized system that as expected; made worse with Proof of Stake.

Animats 4y ago

Hm. Have the economics changed? In a proof of work system, you have to operate a mining farm, using hardware and power. In the new proof of stake system, you just have to operate a validator, which is cheap, and own lots of ETH. So, while there are advantages to front-running, there's not as much cost pressure to do it. The motivations of miners and HODLers are different.

siftrics 4y ago
>there's not as much cost pressure to do it This is false. You never had to run a validator to watch the mempool and do MEV.

hash07e 4y ago

So lets talk it straight. The merge killed the thing that keep ETH DE-centralized. Now who owns more ETH has more power... Like centralized finance.. instead of Defi.

zeroclip 4y ago
This post was from before the merge to proof of stake.
vvpan 4y ago
> Now who owns more ETH has more power... I would argue that that is false. Nobody can approve invalid transactions or maliciously alter the state of the chain. So in that sense, no they do not have more power.

TobyTheDog123 4y ago

ITT: People see a crypto-based headline and write smarmy, reddit-tier, bad-faith comments about something they know nothing about, and don't desire to know anything about. I can see it's already starting.

benreesman 4y ago

Semi-aside: the term “front running” is pretty overloaded and more than a little charged at this point. It gets applied to a whole spectrum of activities from the socially positive (racing to the inside with a post-only limit order to minimize the still positive price improvement) to the murky and probably kind of shady (MEV ecosystem) to outright fraud (an agency execution firm literally loading up before executing a client’s block, intentionally mispricing an IPO). I would submit that it’s probably best just avoided by anyone who’s objective is clear communication. It’s still great for ruckus-making, but that’s probably more of a bug than a feature on HN. FWIW I’m also very skeptical of modern MEV-world. I just think “front running” is a bad term for anything these days.

ISL 4y ago
Came here to write the same. I'm real happy when someone runs ahead of my limit orders and provides me liquidity/execution. If I wanted to pay less, I would have set the limit lower.
- pcthrowaway 4y ago
  You can set a slippage tolerance when you make an order on a decentralized exchange. It's basically the same as a limit order priced to market, where you effectively set the "most you're willing to buy for" / "least you're willing to sell for" and occasionally get better rates. With a DEX your transaction might just not execute at all some of the time of creating the transaction, so you might burn a transaction, and there's no orderbook for the order to sit in til later.
biolotthek 4y ago
What you call socially positive others may call execution cost. Because you might improve on a pension fund limit order. So it's best to not get into this territory.
- benreesman 4y ago
  A non-aggressing order (I'll use post-only limit as an example, but as you probably know there are a zillion kinds of PoL and IOC and flags and stuff that meet this criteria) strictly makes the book deeper, or narrower, or both. A pension fund (or rather the agency execution-type firm that they'd be crazy not to employ for block trades) wants deep books and narrow spreads: if they were in the business of collecting maker rebates then they'd be market makers, which would make them terrible pension fund managers. If their agency execution firm is able to shave a bit of slippage/friction off by leaving some passive orders in the book I suppose they might have some luck with that, but there's no way that punishing retail traders with wider spreads on the off chance that an agency execution firm has to have a socially-approved client is a net win under any definition of socially positive. Execution cost for non-advanced actors is wide spreads, shallow insides, and high fees: strict market makers improve all of that. People who make arguments like this one are usually day traders with no business using limit orders. I'm not saying that's what you are, but that's usually where you hear it: certainly to the extent that this argument has an intellectual pedigree other than that awful Lewis book, that's it.

viraptor 4y ago

While technically correct, this post is such a gaslight exercise. It boils down to: Frontrunning is profitable and bad for the system. So let's discuss our totally trusted system optimising the frontrunning. It's good for everyone, promise. Just don't ask about the impact on the transaction throughput and fees that comes from those transactions existing in the first place. And don't google rent seeking. Remember optimising a bad thing is good, because it's a local minimum, so let's make sure to restore it in eth2!

danuker 4y ago

And that server was: Cloudflare: https://relay.flashbots.net/ https://relay.flashbots.net/

adv0r 4y ago

as of today, only 21% ( 90537 of 429393) of validators are connected to one single server. source: the single server https://boost-relay.flashbots.net/ https://boost-relay.flashbots.net/ We are in mev-boost infancy and there are already 8 relay to chose from, beside home-building of blocks.

nothrowaways 4y ago

Single point of failure

everfree 4y ago
It's actually not a single point of failure, there's a graceful fallback where the client builds a block locally.

lazzlazzlazz 4y ago

This is a deeply misleading headline. Other people have explained it as well, but Flashbots is a relay for transmitting transactions to the Ethereum network in a way that preserves their privacy (and exposure to something called MEV[1]). It's purely optional and the vast majority of transactions[2] do not actually pass through this relay. MEV is an interesting area of research[3]. Unrelated aside: why is the quality of Hacker News posts and comments on crypto so bad? I experience extreme Gell-Mann amnesia[4] almost every post I read. This is the industry I work in and the amount of misinformation produced and spread on Hacker News is absurd. [1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.05234 https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.05234 [2]: https://explore.flashbots.net https://explore.flashbots.net [3]: https://flashbots.notion.site/flashbots/mev-day-836f88806995412dabc1c7bb7ce4e830 https://flashbots.notion.site/flashbots/mev-day-836f88806995... [4]: https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2021/01/18/gell-mann-amnesia/ https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2021/01/18/gell-mann-amnesia/

biolotthek 4y ago
codehalo 4y ago
> Unrelated aside: why is the quality of Hacker News posts and comments on crypto so bad? I experience extreme Gell-Mann amnesia[4] almost every post I read. It's because the posters think they are smart. With every passing day that cryptocurrencies become adopted/accepted, their smartness becomes questionable, even to themselves. For them, it is easier to double down on the flawed arguments - well over 10 years now - than accept that while they are smart in some areas, they are not in all.

seba_dos1 4y ago

Somewhat counterintuitively, PoW is inherently centralized. Its properties that make it viable at all also make it easy to become controlled by small number of big actors. This is hardly specific to Ethereum.