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Flash Boys 2: Frontrunning, transaction reordering, consensus instability (2019)

arxiv.org

31–40 of 54 posts

Re: Flash Boys 2: Frontrunning, transaction reordering, consensus instability (2019)

#31
post #21

Anyone who doesn’t like crypto doesn’t have to play with it. It’s a tiny blip of nothing in size when compared to actual markets, and the “crime” that exists in crypto is nothing compared to what large banks facilitate for drug kingpins and oligarchs every single day. Let this weird parallel financial system develop for another decade and see what comes out of it. Might actually solve some problems.

It's not a tiny blip, it's already bigger than European equities...

Not sure what numbers you compared, but quick research on market cap [1,2]:

European market cap 2019: 8,078,748,800,000 (8 trn)

Coinmarketcap today: 1,583,350,504,806 (1 trn)

Not a tiny blip.

Compared to world equity 2021 [3]: 117 trn

I would call it a small blip.

1: https://tradingeconomics.com/european-union/market-capitaliz...

2: https://coinmarketcap.com/

3: https://www.sifma.org/resources/research/research-quarterly-...

Re: Flash Boys 2: Frontrunning, transaction reordering, consensus instability (2019)

#32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a tiny blip, it's already bigger than European equities...

Not sure what numbers you compared, but quick research on market cap [1,2]: European market cap 2019: 8,078,748,800,000 (8 trn) Coinmarketcap today: 1,583,350,504,806 (1 trn) Not a tiny blip. Compared to world equity 2021 [3]: 117 trn I would call it a small blip. 1: https://tradingeconomics.com/european-union/market-capitaliz... 2: https://coinmarketcap.com/ 3: https://www.sifma.org/resources/research/research-quart…

Except that is mostly printed money. You can't take the crypto market cap seriously. If a significant portion of it tries to get converted from "magic internet money" to real money the price will plummet.

Re: Flash Boys 2: Frontrunning, transaction reordering, consensus instability (2019)

#33
post #26

This was the paper that got it started, but now a few years later, strategies have gotten much more advanced. There was an entire conference day devoted to it a few weeks ago, with some interesting talks, if you are interested in the state of the art: https://flashbots.notion.site/MEV-DAY-836f88806995412dabc1c7...

Interesting, thanks!

Re: Flash Boys 2: Frontrunning, transaction reordering, consensus instability (2019)

#34
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People submitting crypto transactions to miners are their clients, as in the miners get paid when one of their transactions occur. Index front running is not illegal and is based on public information. So, this may be a form of legal front running.

There is no way that every transaction signer whose transaction is added to a block should be considered a client of the miner of that block. Most likely none of the transaction signers qualify as clients of the miner. Transactions are transmitted over the network anonymously via a gossip protocol, and hundreds or thousands of miners have the chance to include (or not include) any transaction in a block. Transactions…

> There is no way that every transaction signer whose transaction is added to a block should be considered a client of the miner of that block.

This does not seem obvious to me; even if "client" is too strong a word, the transaction signer and miner have some social contract that's very similar to more traditional fiduciary duty, even if the technical details and enforcement mechanisms are totally different.

Re: Flash Boys 2: Frontrunning, transaction reordering, consensus instability (2019)

#35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a tiny blip, it's already bigger than European equities...

Not sure what numbers you compared, but quick research on market cap [1,2]: European market cap 2019: 8,078,748,800,000 (8 trn) Coinmarketcap today: 1,583,350,504,806 (1 trn) Not a tiny blip. Compared to world equity 2021 [3]: 117 trn I would call it a small blip. 1: https://tradingeconomics.com/european-union/market-capitaliz... 2: https://coinmarketcap.com/ 3: https://www.sifma.org/resources/research/research-quart…

Yeah. Furthermore, I don’t know how CMC calculates their total but if it uses fully diluted market cap, the crypto total would be even less by a large amount.

Re: Flash Boys 2: Frontrunning, transaction reordering, consensus instability (2019)

#36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure what numbers you compared, but quick research on market cap [1,2]: European market cap 2019: 8,078,748,800,000 (8 trn) Coinmarketcap today: 1,583,350,504,806 (1 trn) Not a tiny blip. Compared to world equity 2021 [3]: 117 trn I would call it a small blip. 1: https://tradingeconomics.com/european-union/market-capitaliz... 2: https://coinmarketcap.com/ 3: https://www.sifma.org/resources/research/research-quart…

Except that is mostly printed money. You can't take the crypto market cap seriously. If a significant portion of it tries to get converted from "magic internet money" to real money the price will plummet.

You realise that applies to “real money” too right?

Re: Flash Boys 2: Frontrunning, transaction reordering, consensus instability (2019)

#37
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think (1) is a bit harsh relating to the terminology. Technically front running is based on plainly “non-public” information. The term has been generalised and expanded to include crypto transactions which are slightly more obfuscated from the average user who doesn’t sit and watch the mempool. I think the term is completely appropriate.

I respectfully don't think it is too harsh. Every legal definition I know of frontrunning requires a client relationship. Even in the case of "non-public" information, frontrunning refers to trading ahead of your client based on non-public information related to the clients securities. Trading on non-public information when a client is not involved is referred to as insider trading. Also in this context, the reason t…

Not sure why you are so hung up on the semantics. Obviously the "legal definition" of frontrunning is different from the crypto native definition. What matters is that it adeptly captures the nature of these actions.

Re: Flash Boys 2: Frontrunning, transaction reordering, consensus instability (2019)

#38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a tiny blip, it's already bigger than European equities...

Not sure what numbers you compared, but quick research on market cap [1,2]: European market cap 2019: 8,078,748,800,000 (8 trn) Coinmarketcap today: 1,583,350,504,806 (1 trn) Not a tiny blip. Compared to world equity 2021 [3]: 117 trn I would call it a small blip. 1: https://tradingeconomics.com/european-union/market-capitaliz... 2: https://coinmarketcap.com/ 3: https://www.sifma.org/resources/research/research-quart…

I meant volumes traded. European equities are 50 billion per day, crypto is 100.

Re: Flash Boys 2: Frontrunning, transaction reordering, consensus instability (2019)

#39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no way that every transaction signer whose transaction is added to a block should be considered a client of the miner of that block. Most likely none of the transaction signers qualify as clients of the miner. Transactions are transmitted over the network anonymously via a gossip protocol, and hundreds or thousands of miners have the chance to include (or not include) any transaction in a block. Transactions…

> There is no way that every transaction signer whose transaction is added to a block should be considered a client of the miner of that block. This does not seem obvious to me; even if "client" is too strong a word, the transaction signer and miner have some social contract that's very similar to more traditional fiduciary duty, even if the technical details and enforcement mechanisms are totally different.

It is so curious that you use the term “fiduciary duty” to describe the relationship between a miner and the signers of the transactions it includes in its mined blocks.

The primary rationale of fiduciary duty is trust. In contrast, the whole reason that miners even exist is so that the service they provide can be performed in an entirely antagonistic environment, without trust.

I suppose it can be said that a miner’s “social contract is very similar to more traditional fiduciary duty”, but only in the sense that a thing is somehow conceptually related to the exact opposite of that thing.

Miners are anti-fiduciaries.

Re: Flash Boys 2: Frontrunning, transaction reordering, consensus instability (2019)

#40
I tell people who are interested in the crypto market: just look at the structures and concepts that exist in "centralized finance" and replicate them for the crypto world. (Eg: risk systems, custodial systems, index calculators, portfolio management, the list goes on, etc... )

This 2019 paper simply re-confirms that thought. Crypto today is no different than the 1900 turn-of-the-century bucket-shop pump-and-dump scams of previous Wall Street iterations.

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