trained as a mining engineer. now i mine MEV.

risk frameworks from mine-safety class are still the mental model i use when i read smart contracts. weirdly, it makes more sense looking back than it did while i was in it.

Mining engineering has a concept called the hierarchy of controls: eliminate the hazard, substitute it, engineer around it, add administrative controls, and only then add PPE as a last line. PPE — the hard hat, the vest — is the most visible and the least effective. The hierarchy exists because humans are bad at following procedures under pressure and PPE doesn't prevent the thing from happening; it just reduces injury when it does.

I think about this constantly when I audit smart contracts.

The "eliminate the hazard" equivalent in smart contract security is: don't hold user funds at all. Stateless, non-custodial, pure computation. The "PPE" equivalent is a multisig and a bug bounty. Both are better than nothing. Neither is better than not having the hazard.

MEV is an interesting case because the hazard is the mechanism. You can't eliminate it — it's a property of how blockchains sequence transactions. So you're mostly in the "substitute" and "engineer around it" layers: private mempools, commit-reveal schemes, auction mechanisms. The MEV protection layer in AlphaEngine is basically applied hierarchy-of-controls thinking, even though I didn't name it that when I built it.

The mental model transferred. The domain didn't. I'm not sure what to make of that except that it's probably true for most engineering disciplines, and that maybe the curriculum was doing more useful work than I credited it for at the time.