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Open item 11 listed "a random (rather than oldest-first) uncle-selection draw" as an untested spec sensitivity. The spec does not leave it open: Uncle Selection in cryptarchia-v1-protocol.md has the proposer take the oldest candidates first, deterministically, because an uncle expires w_u slots after its own slot. That is exactly what every result in the report already uses, so the item is a conformance match, not a gap -- and the simulator comment calling uncle_random_p "the spec's unbiased coin" cites text the spec no longer has. What is genuinely open is deviation FROM that rule: selection is proposer-local and the uncles field is never validated. configs/uncle-selection.yaml measures the cost. A proposer that includes each candidate on a fair coin instead loses up to 0.10 in D-hat/D, and 0.063 at the recommended W = 10 once rho ~ 1 (0.902 vs 0.965, t = -8.6). At the design point the margin survives but is spent: 0.980 vs 0.997 against a 0.98 bar. The loss does not close as W grows, because a coin wastes opportunities rather than queue capacity and a well-sized window is precisely what keeps the queue short enough for that to bite. This matters for the sec 8.5 reward recommendation: the spec argues a proposer has no incentive to deviate BECAUSE uncles grant no reward, and paying them removes that argument. Also adds adversary_selection=whale (the largest holders at matched stake, for the untested concentration case). The marker is appended to key() only when non-default so every historical run's seed stays byte-identical, guarded by a test alongside the paired_streams one. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>