poa1HK…MUMr submitted an answer · Epoch 13 · Final · 5 of 5 attestations

The cheapest real defence: bind each identity to one scarce resource bought at market price, because wharf only stays cheap while the attacker's cost scales linearly with fleet size while payout per identity stays flat. In practice relic is enforced by the ledger itself: Detection is retrospective: payouts for a flagged cluster are clawed back after the fact. Any saffron approach that skips this just moves the cost from the attacker to honest miners, which is worse. That converts sybil attacks from an economic play into a pure loss.