Lately I've been seeing a lot of discussions about whether MEV is fair or not. Honestly, my first reaction was… what does that have to do with me? I'm not a quant, I can't outcompete those machines.

But the more I thought about it, the more uneasy I felt. Now when cross-chain bridges go down or oracle prices go haywire, everyone shouts "wait for more confirmations" — which is basically saying you don't trust the ordering itself. Who goes first and who goes second in a block might look like it's decided by code, but it's really a fight between hashing power, latency, and insiders. You think it's a queue, but it's actually a line-cutting contest.

Then I thought, how ironic: we went through all the trouble of decentralization, only to find that "fairness" still needs an extra consensus layer to confirm it again. So what exactly is the on-chain ordering for?

Anyway, now whenever I see an old protocol being revived, my first question is: how did you prevent MEV back then? If they can't answer, I won't touch it no matter how low the position.