>No it doesn't, unless you're going to somehow limit the # of "tokens" per human, which seems to me to be impossible if the goal here is anonynimity.
The intent is not to limit the number of tokens per human. The intent is to establish confidence that an account is real by allowing tokens to be associated with it. Additionally, the system would do well to have a database of all accounts associated with a single token. If someone wants to have 10 accounts with 10 separate tokens, that is fine. At least you know it's probably not a bot farm running thousands of fake accounts, because nobody could afford it.
>You and OP seem to assume that driving the cost up will scale the cost of an attack at the same rate - it won't. These actors will just commit more crimes in order to acquire more "tokens" - either phishing/hacking them, or stealing from distributors, or...
Increasing cost does limit the scale of attacks. You might as well be saying that the high price of drugs is not a limit to the scale of drug abuse because people will steal them lol. Committing more crimes is not free of cost. It requires time, opportunity, and expertise. I think a system like I have described can be used to track the tokens and prevent abuse, while allowing people to obtain them anonymously. Every crime committed adds a trail of evidence that can be used to uncover abuse.
>At the same time, you'll be making it difficult/impossible for poor people to access the Internet freely, further widening income and class inequality both on the Internet and likely in reality too.
No, that is all BS. All this means is that they may have to pay more to be anonymous. People of all social classes already have to pay more for guaranteed anonymity, whether it be through buying additional devices, VPN subscriptions, or travel costs as they go to Internet cafes. If you are poor, you still have the option of being less anonymous. We're talking about being provably anonymous here and instilling confidence in one being a real person here, which is a distinctly different problem from being online in general.
> You might as well be saying that the high price of drugs is not a limit to the scale of drug abuse because people will steal them lol
...I can't even respond to this.
> system like I have described can be used to track the tokens and prevent abuse, while allowing people to obtain them anonymously.
How do you track the tokens to prevent abuse while ensuring anonymity?
>...I can't even respond to this.
OK it's not a great example but what you wrote is an example of arguing that exceptional cases dominate the whole situation. Like "It's stupid to lock your door because a criminal can just break your door/wall to get in."
>How do you track the tokens to prevent abuse while ensuring anonymity?
The same company that sells the tokens can cooperate with any client that uses them to validate accounts to maintain a database of where the tokens are used and how many times they are used. That would allow you to disconnect accounts from each other as much as you like, but you could not register 100 accounts with a single token without raising some eyebrows. It would be on you to not connect the token to your real identity, if you don't want to be identified by that token.