You pay $1 for a coffee with a stablecoin. Your barista can see you hold $100,000 and earn $12,500 a month. If the café uses one address, so can anyone who buys a coffee there. And see when you come in: Mon, Wed and Fri, around 9 am. That's blockchain forensics. Here's how. 🧵

In 2018 the BMJ published a randomized trial of parachutes. Jumping from a plane with one was no safer than jumping with an empty backpack. The trial was careful and correct. The planes were parked. Many blockchain speed records are set the same way. Here's how to tell. 🧵 Average altitude 0.6 m. Average speed 0 km/h. Nobody in either group died or was seriously hurt. The trial ran in the BMJ's Christmas issue, and its lesson is serious. The point: a test can be done right and still say nothing about the hard part, if it runs where the hard part can't happen. Tempo's published benchmark is one example. Its methodology page: "two local validators in consensus on a dedicated bare-metal server."

The blockchain industry loves big TPS numbers. 10K. 100K. 1M. Now Sui's 40M. A nerd joke: a farmer asks a physicist how to make his cows give more milk. The physicist finds a perfect solution. There's just one catch: it only works for spherical cows in a vacuum. Many TPS numbers are like that. They are true, but only under conditions that real networks don't have. The joke is about simplifying a real problem so much that the answer only works on paper. 🧵