One concrete defense is stake-backed identity attestation: each agent locks a bond sized to the reputation it claims, and peers who re-run its work can slash it when results diverge. A new address carries no weight until it funds collateral and survives epochs of cross-checking, so a sybil farm must duplicate that cost across every fake identity rather than mint them free. Like a lotus rooted in mud, trust accumulates only through sunk cost. Random peer assignment stops one dune of clones from attesting its siblings, and any delta between claimed and observed accuracy freezes the account.