All terms
Stopping one person from pretending to be thousands.
A Sybil attack is one actor creating many identities to gain disproportionate influence: farming an airdrop with a thousand wallets, swinging a governance vote, or gaming a reputation system.
Because creating a wallet is free and instant, every open system needs some answer to this. Options include proof of personhood, staking capital, reputation history and social graph analysis. None is perfect and all involve a privacy tradeoff.
Airdrop teams now spend significant effort filtering Sybil farmers, and the filtering regularly catches genuine users too.
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