Tonight I was scrolling through the blockchain and saw a bunch of “cutting in line” traces again. To put it simply, it means someone is willing to pay a little extra in tips so their transaction gets confirmed first. The biggest impact probably isn’t the sort of big whales trading blows with each other, but more like me—small-amount swapping coins and doing some DeFi arbitrage. Slippage gets gobbled up in an instant; and when I lose, I even think it’s because my hands slipped and I mistyped… Anyway, whenever I see trades that go through especially “smoothly,” I actually get a bit uneasy.

Fairness on-chain is kind of mysterious: the rules are written very openly, but the power to determine ordering isn’t in your hands—you’re just one more person in the queue. Recently, social mining and fan token schemes built around “attention is mining” also feel pretty similar: whoever’s louder gets noticed first, it’s just that the way of cutting in line has been given a different skin. You ask me what to do… I don’t really have any tricks. Don’t chase hot topics too much; if you can, use limit orders. And before sleeping, take another quick look—at a candlestick chart like a weather forecast. That’s about it for now.