Lately, I’ve been watching the options book, and the more I look, the more I feel that this “time value” thing is pretty “honest”: the buyer pays rent every day, and even if the market doesn’t move, they still get ground down; the seller looks like they’re collecting rent on the surface, but in reality they’re betting that nothing goes weird—once volatility actually shows up, they’re essentially trading away tail risk for small change. Put simply, time value mainly eats the buyer’s patience and error tolerance, while the seller “cashiers” the “steady happiness” inside their own psychological account.

It also makes me think of how everyone is complaining right now about validators/miners’ income, MEV, and unfair ordering: you think you’re going head-to-head with the market, but a lot of the time you first get taxed by “sequence,” especially with stop-loss orders and the kind of behavior that involves both chasing pumps and cutting during dumps—slippage plus getting squeezed by the situation, before time value even starts chewing on you, and people end up numb.

The information environment is just too noisy. My noise-reduction strategy is one simple rule: only record on-chain data after my real trades—failure reasons, nonce, gas, and signs of being inserted ahead of—don’t treat someone else’s screenshots as the whole world. That’s just how I do it, so I don’t get cut by emotional options once a day.