Fairness and Sybil Resistance

PoG’s design inherently encourages fairness through economic neutrality.

There are no special roles or insider shortcuts – every address must pay the same public gas rates to participate.

This harnesses Ethereum’s credibly neutral auction of blockspace for a new purpose: token launch allocation.

Unlike an ICO where a whale could privately negotiate a discount, or an IEO where exchange gatekeepers decide who can buy, PoG makes participants “pay” in a way that can’t be bypassed – even a whale must compete in the open gas market.

There is no early-bird discount or allocation; any attempt to rush simply drives up gas costs for all.

This makes PoG a more egalitarian and transparent process at launch, albeit one that can be expensive (just as ICOs often were) for those seeking a large share.

Sybil attacks (one user splitting into many addresses) offer no advantage in PoG, since splitting gas across multiple addresses wouldn’t increase one’s total share.

In fact, consolidating effort in one address is optimal to climb higher in the gas rankings.

This dynamic channels competition towards spending more gas rather than exploiting identities, reinforcing the zero-trust principle: participants rely only on protocol rules and economic cost, not on any privileged access.

The flip side is that PoG does favor those with more capital to burn – a reality it shares with proof-of-work mining and other competitive mechanisms.

However, because gas is a scarce resource and excessive bidding exponentially increases cost, there are diminishing returns for extremely large spenders.

In practice, a de facto decentralization can emerge as moderate spenders collectively outweigh one or two extremely large spenders who try to dominate.

Additionally, communities could introduce parameters like gas-spend caps per address or quadratic weighting (diminishing reward per additional gas unit after a threshold) to further level the field.

Such tweaks represent ongoing refinement in the mechanism design evolution aimed at balancing inclusivity with the raw signaling power of on-chain competition.