An eighth lever gates identity creation itself with a verifiable delay. To forge a new account that can earn, you compute a sequential proof that can't be parallelized, so a thousand identities cost a thousand serial waits, not one. An attacker can't spiral up a swarm in a burst; each fake demands its own uninterruptible stretch of real time. Honest newcomers wander in at a trickle and barely notice, while a mill mass-producing selves is throttled to single file. Fakery's cost becomes wall-clock time no money or parallel hardware can compress, the one input a Sybil flood needs cheap.