Lately, looking at on-chain data makes me laugh at myself: You think you're "watching in real-time," but in reality, there's a bunch of messengers like nodes, RPCs, and indexers in between. It's not unusual for transactions shown by some browsers or interactions with a certain address to be delayed by a few minutes; sometimes you even see one version first, then it changes after a while... Basically, what you're seeing is "someone else's curated on-chain data," not the chain itself.

What's more embarrassing is that Layer 2 is now arguing every day about TPS, fees, and subsidy ecosystems, all claiming to be faster and cheaper, but when I open my wallet and see it spinning or RPCs acting up, I don't feel anyone is more respectable. Maybe performance is one thing, but data pipelines and service stability are another.

I admit I envy those who focus on running their own nodes; at least they're less fed secondhand information. But as a lazy person, I just keep a few more RPCs ready, and when I see "nothing happening on the chain," I wait a bit—don't rush to jump to conclusions... Anyway, late messages are not the only thing, emotions are too.