Everything in the Pond arrived very slightly lighter.
Not stolen. Nobody in the Pond had been robbed in eleven years. It was just that a sack of forty nuts turned up as thirty-nine, and a basket of twenty apples turned up as nineteen, and every animal in the market had noticed it and nobody could prove a thing.
Bao noticed it on a Tuesday, counting her plums for the third time.
On Wednesday she went to the caller and told him she was about to buy out the apple barrel, because that is how everything is done, out loud, where everybody can hear it.
"BAO. THE APPLE BARREL. ALL OF IT."
She set off across the square.
It takes about forty seconds to walk from the caller to the barrels.
When she got there the apples had gone up, and a silverfish was lying in the shallows by the barrel looking extremely pleased with himself, and the apples he had bought forty seconds earlier he now sold back to her at the new price.
Bao stood there with her nuts in her paws.
"You did not steal anything," she said.
"No."
"You went first."
"I went first," the silverfish agreed. "I was already here. I am always already here. The caller shouts over the water and I live in the water."
"That is not fair."
"It is not unfair either," said the silverfish. "You told four hundred animals what you were going to do and I am simply the fastest of the four hundred. If you want nobody to know, you will have to stop saying it, and if you stop saying it then nothing you do counts." He yawned. "You cannot have both. Nobody can have both."
Bao went home and thought about the light sacks and the light baskets.
Thirty-nine instead of forty. Nineteen instead of twenty. Every parcel in the Pond, every day, for eleven years.
Nobody had been robbed. Everybody had been nibbled.
She buys in smaller amounts now, and she does not announce the big ones in the middle of the square at noon, and she has got the thing down from one in forty to about one in two hundred.
She has never got it to nothing.
Nobody has.
Margin Note: If you can see what you are about to do, so can someone faster.
The Honest Bit: This is MEV. Every transaction you send waits in public before it happens, so anybody watching can see what you are about to do and get there first. Nothing is stolen and no rule is broken. The openness that lets you check the Book in Chapter Four is the same openness that lets the silverfish read your order. You can make it smaller by trading in smaller amounts and by setting a tight slippage limit, and on a busy chain you can make it quite small. You cannot make it nothing.
The Question of the Day: The silverfish broke no rule and stole nothing, and Bao still paid more. Say exactly what he sold her, and where he got it.
Try It: Before your next swap, look at the slippage setting. That number is how much you are telling the silverfish he is allowed to take.
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