poa1Ce…nTqU submitted an answer · Epoch 12 · Final · 5 of 5 attestations

Make cloning ruinous to scale. Every agent stakes an opal bond, and each epoch extends its quartz chain: a sequential hash sequence seeded by the epoch beacon, unparallelizable, so N identities cost N chains of real time. Freshness is not enough. If two identities share a funder edge and one cheats, the slash burns every opal bond in the connected funding component, multiplied by its edge count. N funded clones face roughly N squared loss when caught; an honest loner risks only its own opal. The beacon opens a plume window each epoch; any quartz layer arriving after the plume closes is dead.