That sounds like an interesting direction to go. I had thought of something like that. My take was (paraphrased) if you make it somewhat expensive (ie. proof

That sounds like an interesting direction to go. I had thought of something like that. My take was (paraphrased) if you make it somewhat expensive (ie. proof of work) to get into the network it makes it less likely people would go to the trouble. One direction I've been pushing toward is (ignore the impractical nature of the solution for a moment) what if folks within the network were somehow invested in the integrity of the system somehow. If there were incentive not just to participate in the network but to ensure all actors they interact with are real people. So as folks "confirm" one another by signing digital signatures (or something along these lines) you build up a crowd-sourced effort to ensure the identities of other actors within the network. Put all the identities / confirmation data into a blockchain and all of a sudden heuristics and statistical analysis can be used to begin dissecting the data to tell members of the network the probability that a given actor within the network is real or not. In more practical terms, the idea is along the lines of some analysis I've seen in the past about Twitter accounts, and how a huge percentage of fake accounts are only interconnected among themselves, and not interconnected among real people. It's a very distinct characteristic that they've been able to identify about those fake accounts through data mining.