I just finished translating an old post. Back in 2017, everyone was hyping “on-chain transparency,” with all kinds of address labels filling up an entire screen. But when you look at it now—things have flipped. People are starting to doubt how much you can really trust this stuff.

To put it plainly, address profiling is becoming more and more like a jigsaw puzzle. You look at an address, slap a “whale” label on it—then you find out it might be an associated address of some dog-style high-yield scheme, or maybe just a transfer stop on a cross-chain bridge. The deeper the money flow and the more clusters form, the more the picture turns blurry. I used to believe this, but later I realized I was just looking at labels, not the people behind them.

Recently, watching the tug-of-war between miners and validators, along with all the complaints about ordering fairness—honestly, it’s pretty chaotic. Some people say MEV is making too much money; others say they didn’t get their share of the oil and water. What I find most annoying isn’t that it’s slow—it’s that it’s messy. Slow can be endured, at least you can wait; if the rhythm gets thrown off, everything collapses. If ordering gets controlled by someone like a toy, everyone’s going to feel bad.

Anyway, let’s leave it at that. Profiling is for reference, but don’t treat it as truth. Read more of the history, and trust the labels less.