I will, again, reiterate that a Sybil attack is about power, not about convincing people you hold multiple identities - that is simply the means - it is not an effective attack if it doesn't get you that power over the network. The proof in the post clearly demonstrates how Sybilling reduces power in that scheme.

Your attack is not a Sybil attack - you've simply surrounded a user with extremely uncooperative nodes who manipulate or censor the user (the former of which isn't even economically feasible in the scheme of the OP, but that's tangential). If the uncooperative nodes surrounding the user all authoritatively proved they were unique identities, well, it obviously wouldn't be a Sybil attack then.

Yet these *unique* uncooperative nodes can perform the equivalent attack you keep bringing up. If you've read carefully at all, then you know I've just proven it can't be a Sybil attack - because *it has nothing to do with node identity and is not reliant on duplicating.*

Furthermore, this attack you describe, which is not strictly reliant on Sybilling, is on a user and not the network. I go as far to argue that even this individual user has recourse, which is beyond the primary claim - and as far as I'm concerned, true.

So addressing that - your argument is that nodes can afford to attack users because they can budget in the expense and surround users. But you can't carry this through - it always involves ripping users off and getting more money from them, and there are various ways for users to escape, including getting a new ISP.

In fact, even traditional monopolistic strategies don't even work to drown competition - because the network is open and it cannot be 51% attacked, so no majority can ever exclude competing nodes from publishing to the chain and earning rewards.

If a user has a constrained network which only routes to one provider - that isn't a Sybil attack, and it certainly isn't an attack on the network itself. I took the liberty to go above and beyond and argue that even these practices become unsustainable when you have a network with these qualities.

But I do not concede that just because one way you can perform this attack is by Sybilling that it is actually a Sybil attack - as I proved by showing you can perform it without duplicating oneself - hell you can do it with a single presented node to the user; what you are describing is hoarding network traffic.