I used to be quite stubborn, often saying "I only look at the chain," as if glancing at mempool could reveal all of existence... Later, I was educated by slippage: you think you're placing an order, but you're actually helping others rhyme their poetry.

For block builders and bundles, retail investors really don't need to memorize the entire dictionary. To put it simply, knowing two points is enough: first, your transaction isn't necessarily "queued"; it might be bundled into a bunch of flowers and inserted into a block; second, the price you see is just a storefront poster, the actual transaction depends on liquidity depth and whether someone is dancing in front or behind you. Don't blindly trust "setting low slippage is safe," sometimes it just makes it easier to fail and retry, with fees written off as prose.

Recently, before and after the upgrade/maintenance of that mainstream public chain, people in the group have been guessing whether there will be a major migration. I think there's no need to rush writing an epic; the most honest signals on-chain are still whether the bridges and pools are thinning out, and whether trading is starting to get sluggish. Anyway, I no longer dare to look at the chain alone... emotions also need a second look, or else the rhetoric of losses will just keep growing longer.