Lately, I've been seeing everyone arguing about miner/validator income, MEV, and whether transaction ordering is fair, and I can't help but feel a bit envious: they can just sit there and earn profits, while retail investors can only guess based on candlestick charts... But honestly, many people think they are "watching the chain," when in fact they are looking at the version provided by nodes/RPCs/indexers, which might be outdated.

For the same transaction, the RPC you're using might not have caught up with the latest block, the indexer could still be rebuilding the queue, and your browser cache might not be refreshed, so the timeline you see is like a delayed live broadcast. What's even worse: if you use this "delayed on-chain" data for risk control, such as collateralization ratios and liquidation risk assessments, you'll be off by a beat, and the infection path can easily be overlooked. Anyway, I'm now used to checking multiple RPCs and cross-referencing with raw block data—better to be a little slower than to be fooled by interfaces that look "on-chain."