Whenever I see a certain pool on the chain suddenly heat up, I get itchy to jump in and “pick up some arbitrage.” Basically, it’s fear of missing out—fear that I’ll end up that kind of fool who only watches others take the profits. But if you actually click into the trade details, you’ll see that many so-called opportunities are really just someone else’s source of fees: you think you’re making money on the price spread, but MEV bots slice you from before and after—you’re just providing them with liquidity and momentum.

The most disgusting part of sandwich attacks isn’t being sandwiched once—it’s realizing in your post-trade review: slippage, gas, routing. Even if you set everything very conservatively, you might still be turned into a sitting duck by “congestion + estimate distortion.” And now social mining and fan token schemes—“attention is mining”—are trendy again. Watching it, it feels like feeding material to the next round of get-out-ahead rushes: a bunch of people charge into the hype, causing congestion on-chain, and in the end, the ones that earn the most reliably are still the group that’s watching the mempool. Anyway, my recent approach is kind of old-school: I’d rather make fewer trades than become expendable in someone else’s strategy.