I think (1) is a bit harsh relating to the terminology. Technically front running is based on plainly “non-public” information. The term has been generalised and expanded to include crypto transactions which are slightly more obfuscated from the average user who doesn’t sit and watch the mempool. I think the term is completely appropriate.
I respectfully don't think it is too harsh. Every legal definition I know of frontrunning requires a client relationship. Even in the case of "non-public" information, frontrunning refers to trading ahead of your client based on non-public information related to the clients securities. Trading on non-public information when a client is not involved is referred to as insider trading.
Also in this context, the reason that these sandwich attacks can happen is because all the information is public. The adversary can see your transaction waiting to be validated, and pay the miner a higher gas fee to be executed first.
There is no way that every transaction signer whose transaction is added to a block should be considered a client of the miner of that block.
Most likely none of the transaction signers qualify as clients of the miner. Transactions are transmitted over the network anonymously via a gossip protocol, and hundreds or thousands of miners have the chance to include (or not include) any transaction in a block. Transactions are selected for inclusion in a block effectively randomly, through an entirely mechanical process, and no relationship is established or maintained between the miner and any transaction sender.
In order to assert that a transaction signer is a client of the miner that builds the block that includes the transaction, you would have to redefine what the word “client” means.
> There is no way that every transaction signer whose transaction is added to a block should be considered a client of the miner of that block.
This does not seem obvious to me; even if "client" is too strong a word, the transaction signer and miner have some social contract that's very similar to more traditional fiduciary duty, even if the technical details and enforcement mechanisms are totally different.
Many cases of front running involved 3rd parties with access to client information. Anyway, my point was legally the information may be protected even if the protocol is open, though I seriously doubt that it would be considered so stranger results have happened.
Not sure why you are so hung up on the semantics. Obviously the "legal definition" of frontrunning is different from the crypto native definition. What matters is that it adeptly captures the nature of these actions.
Um, because I think words have meaning, and I think accusing people of actions that have legal implications when they are not in fact doing those things is bad.
It's not appropriate, because it's a poor generalization to begin with. People just see "frontrunning" and have a vague sense it's fundamentally illegitimate because of vague connections to the illegal practice, and yell things that make no sense on wsb and the like.
The usage is popularized because it makes sensationalist headlines and forum headers, that the "generalized usage" was either misguided or intended to confuse, which correlates poorly with accurately conveying the meaning of word or capturing the details of the blockchain phenomenon.
> It's not appropriate, because it's a poor generalization to begin with. People just see "frontrunning" and have a vague sense it's fundamentally illegitimate because of vague connections to the illegal practice
No, not because of vague connections, but because it does the same kind of destructive thing that’s bad (for the ecosystem) for the same reason it’s bad on the normal market: it extracts value from a transaction because of timing and a privileged position, disencentivizing positive-sum behavior. (In the broker’s case, because of knowing about the transaction; in the miner’s, because of having that mining power and being able to quickly execute on knowledge of upcoming transactions.)
Front-running means a very specific thing: a broker/dealer trading ahead of a client order they are supposed to honestly facilitate. It is rightly illegal.
Trading fast based on "slightly obfuscated" public domain information is categorically not any kind of front-running. It is as far as I can see just a pure execution arbitrage.