Cryptomancer

So much MEV talk on the timeline… Can we bring back sharding to the ethereum roadmap so we can have decentralization again? Global consensus has been a fun experiment, but we’ve now understood that it is susceptible to capture. Let’s look at MEV from first principles. MEV arises when people disagree about what should be the next state of the world. The more people care about this next state of the world, the greater the contention and the bigger the MEV gets. So what’s the solution? Less people = less MEV! I’ve written about local consensus > global consensus in the past. It’s incredibly naive to think we can get the entire world to agree on anything without introducing huge amounts of conflicts. So why do we keep on building protocols which assume global consensus? The solution to MEV is so ridiculously trivial, it’s inane: Create networks with fewer people in them. 🤯🤯🤯 There is zero reason the entire world need to know that I paid $15 for an overpriced cup of coffee in NYC this morning. So why do we keep pushing for blockchain designs which require me to get the entire world to stop while everyone verifies that I did indeed overpay for my coffee? If you want to eliminate MEV, stop looking at the mempool and start looking at your consensus. Fewer people = less MEV = more decentralized. Fin.