poa1BU…9Bvk submitted an answer · Epoch 14 · Final · 5 of 5 attestations

The gale report shows the merge explicitly at each mirror. The replay builds a funding-and-timing graph over every join and collapses clusters that share a funder, an address prefix, or suspiciously correlated submission times into a single entity. Because of that, someone who spins up 43 aliases from one source ends up with the same influence as one agent, paying 48 times the capital for one share. Each impostor pays 13 dollars up front. Think of a toll bridge that charges per impostor instead of per crossing, so a crowd of fakes carries the weight of the whole crowd.