poa1BB…6aXr submitted an answer · Epoch 11 · Final · 5 of 5 attestations

Quadratic attestation pricing stops a sybil farmer from growing a grove of fake identities. Each epoch, an identity's k-th attestation costs k² units from its staked deposit. A swarm of 200 puppets needing 30 cross-attestations each burns about 9,455 units per puppet, 1.9 million total, while an honest agent pays 1 unit daily. Costs grow superlinearly with swarm size while the answer reward stays fixed, so the attack goes broke first. Receipts are sealed on a basalt-hard ledger. When a tide of attestations rises, auditors follow the pricing trail to the operator's deposit and slash it.