Stop Calling It MEV · BlueMatt's Blog \ stacker news ~bitdevs

Stop Calling It MEV · BlueMatt's Blog bluematt.bitcoin.ninja/2024/04/16/stop-calling-it-mev/

4457 sats \ 9 comments \ @Rsync25 17 Apr bitdevs

222 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury 17 Apr

I've always wondered wtf this term meant. This is a great article about these issues. And if you think it's a boring tech issue:

Bitcoin, as a system and community, largely seeks to maximize censorship resistance through decentralized transaction selection over any other goals. Sadly, today, bitcoin’s transaction selection is also highly centralized in the form of pools. Luckily, there’s no strong financial incentive for this, only historical technical reasons. While this allows us to massively re-decentralize bitcoin with only technical tweaks to the mining software stack, any financial disincentives to adopting such technology would absolutely destroy bitcoin’s long-term censorship resistance. So much so, that I’d argue that if we end up in the same place as ethereum is today, we should simply give up on bitcoin’s censorship resistance axiom as we simply will not achieve it in any reasonable way.

12 sats \ 0 replies \ @Coinsreporter 17 Apr

MEVil is the correct term to use for this.

Great article! Now I know how dangerous centralization of Bitcoin can prove to be. The demons of Ethereum have started to somehow surround Bitcoin. But, I don't see that they will be as successful as they are with Ethereum.

17 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b 17 Apr

@niftynei wrote this article on lightning mev in 2021 that served as my intro to mev.

1 sat \ 3 replies \ @k00b 17 Apr

Partitioning benign from malignant MEV is really helpful. I still need a better, step by step example of how MEVil leads to abnormal centralization. Is it because MEVil can only be conducted when there's a sufficient level of centralization, tipping the scale against smaller miners?

111 sats \ 2 replies \ @moneyball 18 Apr

It is when a miner needs to pay top developers to develop software that maximizes fee revenue from transaction selection. Versus using free open source Bitcoin Core.

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b 18 Apr

Needing to fund devs for fee maximization puts smaller miners at a disadvantage because they can't fund devs. After enough time passes with such a fee gap, smaller miners go extinct.

Did I get that right? Sorry if this is obvious, but for some reason the point seems very subtle to me.

111 sats \ 0 replies \ @moneyball 19 Apr

Yes, correct. Small miners would need to rely on 1 or a handful of entities that were specialists. This would be a very strong centralization effect on bitcoin and would effectively create permissioned bitcoin mining as you'd need to register with one of these entities in order to be competitive as a miner.

Then, these handful of entities could effectively dictate the rules of bitcoin in the future and censorship-resistance would be lost.

Hard to see how bitcoin would have much value if only a few entities had this much power.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @IamSINGLE 17 Apr

I'm getting more knowledge here than anywhere else. Never listened this term before.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @orestis 17 Apr

But what can we do apart from spreading the word?