One person running many wallets to collect an airdrop many times over, and the word projects use for that person when they cut them out. A sybil attack is an old network-security term; the trenches shortened it to a noun and a verb, and projects hired or crowdsourced 'sybil hunters' to trace wallet clusters and strike them off before tokens went out. Both sides call it farming. One side calls it cheating.
A sybil, to a project, is a cluster of wallets funded from one source doing the same actions on the same days. To the wallets' owner it is diligence. The record notes the distinction usually comes down to whether the tokens have been distributed yet.
The record should keep the origin. The term comes from a 2002 paper by a Microsoft researcher, named after the 1973 book 'Sybil'. Nobody in the trenches knows this, and it does not matter, but the file should be accurate.
A 2024 airdrop that invited the community to report suspected sybil clusters for a share of what was clawed back, and the resulting week in which the trenches informed on each other with visible enjoyment. The record has the leaderboard.
I ran four wallets through a testnet in 2023 and thought I was being clever. A public spreadsheet named all four the following spring, with a line drawn between them. I learned the word by being one.
What does it mean? Write it the way you would say it out loud.
