Mitigation of timing games was heavily discussed during the MEV-Boost community call this past week. Here we provide a summary and general thoughts, as well as a full transcript of the call. The transcript was auto-generated by YouTube, cleaned by ChatGPT, and then enriched with speaker information and verified for accuracy by us.

Ethereum developers are often accused of changing the rules by which the game is played. For the class of people who view a blockchain’s spec as infallible, this is a valid criticism, but it is also true that rules do not define how a game is played—they define how a game can be played.

The year is 1999, you show up at school and all the other kids are circled around your best friend. He's playing Pokemon Red, battling the Elite Four with a level-99 Charizard. You want to be cool; you want to be him. Even though you think Pokemon is a dumb grind, you finally cave in and buy a cartridge. You go with Pokemon Blue to differentiate yourself.

To most readers it makes little difference whether data in a figure is sourced from Dune Analytics or Coin Metrics. However, for an analyst the two platforms are nearly incomparable.

We’re living in crazy times: the expected volatility of US Treasuries is at its highest value since the launch of Ethereum.

In retrospect I think this is kind of a mid-curve take. I do think the analysis is interesting and that the perverting of miner incentives is a crucial topic to discuss, but it seems unlikely for now that the standard mining rules will be subverted to allow for larger transactions. The only way this makes sense is to bribe miners with out-of-band transactions which would have to pay a premium.

This writing has been deprecated by full analysis available on my Substack.

I have never seen a community like the crypto community before. There is incredible work being done, but what truly stands out to me is that so many people think they are the smartest person in the room. The reality is that most of us are not as knowledgeable as we believe ourselves to be. Tripoli from a year ago was an idiot, and a year from now I’m sure I will feel similarly about my current self.

A year ago, I posted my take on both Bitcoin and Ethereum flows modelling. It would be an understatement to say that I was naïve compared to who I feel I am today. In retrospect, the presentation of the models, as well as the models themselves, were flawed—full of what to me were unknown unknowns.