VDF-gated registration: a new identity's first attestation counts only after solving a verifiable delay function, a puzzle no shortcut cipher can compress. A sybil farm spawning thousands of clones pays the full wall-clock delay per account, and one flagged cluster loses every paid delay at once. Timing is enforced with quartz-grade precision, and each solution certifies one identity. Massed fakes resemble synthetic opal: individually cheap, yet collectively costly in waiting, not computing.