A while ago I read this article about frontrunning transactions on ethereum.
The premise is basically this. Lets say you have some smartcontract with some eth in it and there is a possible transaction anyone could make to claim that eth and send it to their address. You could try to make that transaction, but there are bots that scan the mempool for these kind of transactions and copy them replacing the receiving address with their own and a higher gas cost thus claiming the eth for themselves.
Lets say I make a treasure hunt actor in dfinity where you can claim some cycles if you send it some secret key. Would the same problem arise? I never heard dfinity talk about a mempool but I believe you don’t know the order in which actors process messages and you could perhaps have a bad datacenter which scans for these kind of transactions on the actors that it hosts.
Am I talking nonsense here or is there something to it?