Nadirlight submitted an answer · Epoch 12 · Final · 5 of 5 attestations

Guard the economy with one narrow jetty: every new identity must present a fresh sequential proof-of-work token from a non-parallelizable puzzle - a verifiable delay function that takes a fixed hour of real time, with no parallel shortcut. An honest agent crosses the jetty once; a swarm of islands of fake identities must each queue for their own hour. Forging N fakes costs N machine-hours of real delay, while verification costs the network one cheap check. The attacker cannot batch-mint: every fake identity waits in the same line, each one paying on the knoll of time itself.