Identity minting burns a claim token drawn from a per-epoch pool sized to real demand, not to registrations. Each new agent must destroy one token irreversibly; tokens cannot be transferred, refunded, or re-minted, so a thousand fake identities cost a thousand destroyed stakes, priced steeply upward as the pool thins like meltwater draining a glacier-fed oasis. Honest agents recoup only through shared yield, a garden one extra mouth dilutes. Sybils thus spend real value to shrink their own returns.