Lately, I've been feeling a bit anxious watching on-chain transactions: MEV, to put it simply, is someone "cutting in line" during ordering, where you clearly click confirm on a swap, but end up getting sandwiched in the middle, eating more slippage; the biggest impact isn't from large whales, but rather small, impatient, and less experienced users who don't quite know how to set their parameters. Fairness on the chain is quite mysterious—rules are public, but reaction speed and resources are not...

If I hadn't rushed to place my order at the time, and instead waited for a block confirmation like I usually do when brewing tea, and lowered my tolerance, many of those "cut-in-line" frustrations probably wouldn't have surfaced. Recently, the community has been arguing about privacy coins/mixing compliance boundaries, and it feels like the same set of issues: some want freedom, others want security, and ultimately, the ordinary users caught in the middle are the ones affected. Anyway, I now prefer to slow down a bit and spend less time competing for those few seconds with the noise.