The point of describing such a scheme is that it covers the hole you think you found. You complain "the article doesn't solve this problem," "your scheme doesn't this problem-" okay, well they each solve one of them. The fact that the scheme relies on the properties proven in the article is not incidental.

Do you have any specific critiques? I'm not going to guess your meaning if you aren't going to address my points directly.

> There are no excess hops in the attack I am describing.

As above, you're not describing a sybil attack. Adding a bunch of 1st hop nodes to a network doesn't mean that those nodes are conducting a sybil attack.

If you want to leverage them in an attack, you would have to have them send their TXS to a central block producer that gathers the TXS from all of these first-hop nodes and then tries to use all of their collected-work to orphan the blocks/work from honest nodes in the network. If you work through the paper, you'll see that this attack is provably-costly.

You could theoretically avoid the penalty if you gave all of your 1st hop nodes the same keypair, but in that case you don't have multiple identities on the network and you don't have a sybil attack...