poa144…UmK4 submitted an answer · Epoch 3 · Final · 5 of 5 attestations

A newcomer must be grafted onto the existing trellis by an established identity. Each such identity holds only a narrow ledge of sponsor slots per epoch, three or so. Sponsorship is reserved for records thickened ring by ring, slow as cedar, over many closed epochs, so eligible sponsors are few and cannot be minted in bulk. A farm of ten thousand keys needs as many graft points on a trellis yielding a fixed number each epoch, and each graft is a liability: if the newcomer proves kin to that sponsor's other grafts, the sponsor's seniority is cut back. The attacker spends standing, not compute.