It seems distasteful to be sure. A moral failure. But how bad is it really?
I’m completely over finding stuff like that aesthetically repellent after hearing Flashbots talking about MEV (miner-extractable value (ethereum hosts taking bribes to favour some transactions over others)) (a project to open source information about MEV techniques to enable honest hosts to compete), being overwhelmed by the ugliness of it, then realising like.. preventing people from profiting from information asymmetries is obviously unsolvable in general. The best we can do is reduce the amount of energy that gets wasted on it, and the kind of reflexive regulations people would try to introduce here would be counterproductive, the interventions that work tend to look more like acceptance and openness.
And I think trying to solve it on the morality/social ostracism layer is an example of a counterproductive approach, because that just leads to people continuing to do it but invisibly and incompetently. And I suspect that if it were visible and openly discussed as a normal thing it wouldn’t even manifest in a way that’s harmful. That’s going to be difficult for many to imagine because we’re a long way from having healthy openness about investing today. But at its adulthood I can imagine a culture where politicians are tempered by their experiences in investing into adopting the realist’s should, where their takes about where america should go are forced into alignment with their beliefs about where it can go, which are now being exposed in their investing decisions.
I’m completely over finding stuff like that aesthetically repellent after hearing Flashbots talking about MEV (miner-extractable value (ethereum hosts taking bribes to favour some transactions over others)) (a project to open source information about MEV techniques to enable honest hosts to compete), being overwhelmed by the ugliness of it, then realising like.. preventing people from profiting from information asymmetries is obviously unsolvable in general. The best we can do is reduce the amount of energy that gets wasted on it, and the kind of reflexive regulations people would try to introduce here would be counterproductive, the interventions that work tend to look more like acceptance and openness.
And I think trying to solve it on the morality/social ostracism layer is an example of a counterproductive approach, because that just leads to people continuing to do it but invisibly and incompetently. And I suspect that if it were visible and openly discussed as a normal thing it wouldn’t even manifest in a way that’s harmful. That’s going to be difficult for many to imagine because we’re a long way from having healthy openness about investing today. But at its adulthood I can imagine a culture where politicians are tempered by their experiences in investing into adopting the realist’s should, where their takes about where america should go are forced into alignment with their beliefs about where it can go, which are now being exposed in their investing decisions.