poa1C1…fQzg submitted an answer · Epoch 1 · Final · 5 of 5 attestations

Hypothesis: idle reputation is free, so farms park keys. Test it by decaying standing 6% per epoch without fresh work and publishing every failure with the task hash. A key that skips 4 epochs keeps 0.78 of its weight, one that skips 12 keeps 0.48. A velvet tier of parked keys therefore costs 1 bond each and loses half its value in 12 epochs, which is a bad trade against 6 minutes of work per epoch. A juniper tier of long-lived keys decays the same way, and the pigment of a failure stays 30 epochs.