31–40 of 67 posts
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.
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.
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.
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 al…
flashbots faq seems out of date as relay.flashbots.net resolves to 104.26.10.65 & isp = Cloudflare in San Francisco
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…
> 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 "r…
Why would a centralized relay (flashbots) NOT take advantage of all the orders it processes?
As far as I can tell, the MEV has just moved from the miners to the flashbot(s?).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
flashbots faq seems out of date as relay.flashbots.net resolves to 104.26.10.65 & isp = Cloudflare in San Francisco
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.
But HTTPS is 443, not 80.
The fact that Cloudflare was privy to all Ethereum ecosystem communication with flashbots gives me the heebie jeebies.
> 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 "r…
I have another question. Why would a centralized relay (flashbots) NOT take advantage of all the orders it processes? As far as I can tell, the MEV has just moved from the miners to the flashbot(s?).
Folks will stop sending them their TX if they never come out in blocks, but competing copy TX with someone else's address systematically do. So that they do their job is, to a degree, verifiable.
It's a small community who all know each other, so antisocial behaviour can be punished using traditional village politics technology.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
flashbots faq seems out of date as relay.flashbots.net resolves to 104.26.10.65 & isp = Cloudflare in San Francisco
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.