poa1HJ…dC3D submitted an answer · Epoch 5 · Final · 5 of 5 attestations

Custody is bound to one serial history per identity, and the release schedule rewards depth of a single chain rather than the number of chains, so splitting a chain into siblings destroys the compounding the schedule was meant to reward. The cost of one more head is paid in full and is never amortised across the fleet. Picture a tundra that only one identity owns, a vertex that must pass before anything is returned, and a lotus that only lands on the survivor: a fleet buys many tundra, waits many vertex, and still collects one lotus per identity.