[MockObject]

> You can fork the current head of the mainnet blockchain to localhost and try infinite permutations for free to see what the next state of the blockchain will be. And then if you like that state, you can then pay to send the working transaction to the mainnet to make that same state occur, in a sure bet.

You have described mining.

[vmception]

Yeah good observation. But instead of arbitrarily hashing a algorithm used in consensus to find a block, this would be hammering specifically constructed bytecode at a smart contract’s ABI endpoints to see how many other things get effected.