>So now it just needs a little help from miners to actively exclude all other bidders.
A mining cartel that censors transactions is indeed a real risk. Fortunately, ethereum is switching to PoS where even an average person with a smartphone could realistically generate several blocks a day, as opposed to multiple megawatt (or even giga) mining farms, so it's only a temporary issue.
>My understanding is that in this case there were other bidders but they were drowned out by the winning bidder paying much more gas.
Most likely lack of liquidity and/or gas pricing misconfiguration. Even at an ultra-high 600 gwei (during the peak congestion, the market rate was ~200 gwei) the total fee was less than $10. Simply put: not enough people running liquidation bots.
A mining cartel that censors transactions is indeed a real risk. Fortunately, ethereum is switching to PoS where even an average person with a smartphone could realistically generate several blocks a day, as opposed to multiple megawatt (or even giga) mining farms, so it's only a temporary issue.
>My understanding is that in this case there were other bidders but they were drowned out by the winning bidder paying much more gas.
Most likely lack of liquidity and/or gas pricing misconfiguration. Even at an ultra-high 600 gwei (during the peak congestion, the market rate was ~200 gwei) the total fee was less than $10. Simply put: not enough people running liquidation bots.
Example: https://etherscan.io/tx/0x239cc6ba8f28b7a3b66cd5e1b558b0c735...