Transactions are clamped, mining pools are doing evil, are Ethereum miners too powerful?

Original title: "Transactions are clamped, mining pools do evil, are Ethereum miners too powerful?" "

Original source: Odaily Planet Daily

Today, < span class="font">YFII founder Gao Jin posted on Weibo: "A certain mining pool ended up trapping people in person? Two 1wei accounts with one 125gwei account, no martial arts. Single profit is 0.12 eth,And this account continues to be included..." caused Intense discussion among the onlookers.

From the block information, it can be seen that the two gas fees mentioned by Gao Jin are "clamped" by the transaction of 1 wei A transaction with a gas fee of 125 Gwei completed the arbitrage. After the address query, the "evil" mining pool mentioned in the article that packaged the two transactions before and after is UU Pool, which accounts for about 1.7% of the current total computing power of the entire Ethereum network.

For a single arbitrage of 0.12 eth, many spectators may not find it novel, but the mining pool "bright card" The possibility of arbitrage makes people think carefully.

From being abused by Bots to being abused by mining pools, leeks call it miserable

If you are a frequent user of DEX< investors of /span>transactions must also suffer from frequent "being caught in the dark forest of Ethereum" I feel the pain of "clamping".

The so-called "clamped" means being Front Running (preemptive transaction). GasPrice) level to sort and package. In DeFi products, the order in which transactions are packaged profoundly affects their economic benefits.

For example in Uniswap  In the same two buy orders for a certain trading pair, the transaction that is executed first will get more tokens. When an investor executes a transaction with a high amount, a large slippage setting, and a low Gas setting, it is easy to encounter a "clamped" situation, and the Bot will send two transactions with a higher Gas in the same time period , rush to buy in front of you, and sell right after your order, you will "sandwich" investors in the middle, and complete an arbitrage behavior of buying low and selling high, which can be said to be "risk-free" gain profit. Many traders may have never noticed, but have been being fished silently.

However, trading robots are common arbitrage tools after all, and robots do not succeed every time, and there are also some other Bots that restrict this type of Bot. Spiral iterations of new products are becoming commonplace. However, "the mining pool will end in person" is very uncomfortable, because the order of transactions determines the distribution of profits, and the miners have the right to decide the order of transactions. This is definitely called a "dimensionality reduction blow".

Generally speaking, miners can arrange transactions in any order, and even pack a transaction directly into a block without broadcasting the transaction. That is to say, as long as blocks can be produced, the order of transactions is in the hands of the mining pool, and such arbitrage can be said to be costless.

Previously Ownbit founder Tan Guopeng released a book "The Dark Forest of Ethereum" The article is very well written: "In this game, ordinary users are players with eyes closed, and arbitrage robots are players with eyes open , while the miners are from the perspective of God, miners directly joining this harvesting game will completely change the pattern of robots.Once the miners with the perspective of God join the game, the result can be imagined. The miners' robots will Expel non-miner robots. These miners will become the biggest dark forces on Ethereum, using their power to harvest users wantonly!"

Will mining pool arbitrage become clear and routine?

The UU Pool for this arbitrage is not a top-ranked mining pool, and its block production rate is limited. It was also discovered because the inversion of the gas fee and the price difference are clear at a glance, but we can't help but wonder if other larger mining pools have similar behaviors, but we haven't found it? And, from a different perspective, does this count as "doing evil"?

Some people even say, will mining pool arbitrage be made public in the future? Mining itself is also a profit-seeking behavior. Is it okay to distribute profits to miners according to computing power?

Miners can extract value as profit directly from smart contracts". Includes regular profits from transaction fees and block rewards, as well as unconventional profits from miners through transaction reorganization, transaction insertion, and transaction censorship.

We have to admit that the mining of miners in the Layer 1 era and the smart contract era have actually undergone many changes. Thinking about it, the portraits of Bitcoin miners and Ethereum miners are very different.

Our inherent thinking is that miners should get paid from block rewards, while traders can profit flexibly from trading strategies , but now, with Ethereum flourishing, has the role of miners changed, using their position in the network to extract additional value from innovative products?

From the perspective of ordinary traders and ecological participants, Odaily Planet Daily believes that the answer is no.

It is also very simple, because we all expect that the encrypted world is a place that is more open, fair, open, and transparent than reality, but With the Game of Thrones on Ethereum becoming more and more public, we can't help but feel a little confused, who is making the rules? Who is restricting power? Who is drawing the bottom line for the profit game?

What fascinates many ordinary investors about DeFi is that it is a "fair" game, and opportunities are paramount. Bottom-up "counterattack" opportunities, and the check and balance of power in the ecology is definitely a science. If the power of miners cannot be effectively limited, we worry whether their role will change from "guardian" to "darkness" of the Ethereum ecology. power"? Then the decay of Ethereum may not be far away.

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