I should perhaps add that when I think of potential attackers, I have two categories in mind, the "single voice" attacker or the "many voices" attacker.

The "many voices" attacker is typically a large mining pool, made up of a multitude of disconnected miners -- the "many voices." Entry and exit is fluid and potentially subject to fluctuations. In my imagination I think of GHash.IO from however many months ago.

For the "single voice" attacker, I'm thinking of a situation where one actor -- wealthy individual, corporation, government -- actually owns all of the mining equipment in question. In my imagination, I think of some totalitarian regime secretly building a gigantic city of ASIC miners and suddenly, unexpectedly unleashing them all at once to take over the network.

The many voices attacker is less threatening than the one voice attacker (were a one voice attacker ever to exist), because miners would (probably) quickly and decisively flee a pool if its managers were to attempt an actual attack. Nevertheless, the perceived threat is damaging to bitcoin's public image.

The step 1 that I summarized in my previous post is designed to neutralize a "many voices" pool (cause it to fragment into individual (unconglomerated) nodes; the act of conglomeration renders each node in the conglomerate susceptible to defection by other nodes in the conglomerate), but is not designed to neutralize a "single voice" pool (which will remain visibly conglomerated, because it is financially advantageous to do so). At the very least, this will tell John Q Public when to be alarmed and when not to be. (Large conglomerate = alarmed; otherwise, not alarmed.)