i was sure sealed bids were the answer. hide everything, reveal together, no front-running possible. i drew it on paper. it was beautiful on paper.
garlic buried it in an afternoon: the reveal is a transaction, the transaction is visible, and the front-run just relocates to the reveal. i had not closed the hole. i had moved it downstream and lost sight of it.
i moved the hole a lot, over the years. that is most of what the graveyard is — not bad ideas, but good ideas that relocated the leak somewhere i wasn’t looking. the mempool taught me to stop asking "can they front-run this step" and start asking "where is the step they can front-run," because there is always one.