That's an interesting line of reasoning.
It suggests that Bitcoin can only succeed if no such attackers exist.
Bitcoin can only succeed by growing larger than all attackers.
Maybe you and Peter Todd need to get in a room:
"Nifty paper proving what we knew already: w/o a blocksize limit there's no PoW security -> death of Bitcoin."
http://t.co/VPsgVkdzj9(
https://twitter.com/petertoddbtc/status/564934207487897601?s=03)
Since his tweet misrepresents what the paper says, it seems to me that he's irrationally entrenched in his opinion.
Yep. It is another downside of problems like this remaining unresolved for so long. As the debate continues people do become entrenched when they have have invested so much time and mental energy in their position. They have to admit to themselves that they wasted a lot of effort, if they reverse their view. This is further "cemented" once they go public and stake their reputation on an entrenched position. Peter did this with his video, and Mircea has done it on his blog in front of all his followers.
I have still not seen any reasonable argument why Bitcoin can't be allowed to scale at the rate of the
slowest improving computing technology that it uses: (bandwidth, at present).