Lately, I've been watching the mempool so closely that I'm starting to doubt myself: you think you're "watching the chain," but most of the time you're just looking at a version relayed to you by some RPC or indexer, which may have delays or omissions. Especially with L2s, it's even more obvious—one transaction I see still pending on my end, but a friend already says it's "successful"... Basically, what you're refreshing is a cache, not the block itself.

That social mining concept of "attention is mining" also feels similar: you think you're getting information instantly, but you're actually being fed through routing, recommendations, and queued interfaces. Anyway, now I always ask first when I look at data: which node is it from, and which chain are they referencing?

I still believe: as long as I can get closer to the original source of information, I won't be too passive when faced with delayed "on-chain truths." That's all for now.