It appears that Dash uses the "attacker economist" approach.
I happened to read the quote, but what exactly are you referring to? What part of DASH implementation uses it and what sub-type of attacker economist logic is used?
Here is another quote of exactly what I am getting at in reference to DASH:
In other words, instead of purposely designing their systems to be cryptographically sound so that the "attacker will definitely fail" or the "attacker will probably fail", they instead (unwittingly?) design it so that "the attacker's expected cost of carrying out an attack exceeds the attacker's expected benefit from doing so."
The unfortunate knock-on effect is that such an approach only works like that for a limited time...as the value of the cryptocurrency grows, so does the level of sophistication of the attackers that find it an interesting target.
Trying to solve the privacy problems in a way that relies on the honesty and opsec of a small group of individuals is simply privacy theatre, no different from those that claim that Bitcoin is private as long as there's no address reuse.
IMO you are right on that, however this is a failure of all cryptocurrencies, not DASH exclusively. Cryptocurrencies rely on attacker economist rationale, including Monero, Bitcoin etc. "Honest miners", bloat attacks vs fees increase (Bytecoin attackers (?) on Monero), etc etc.
The mining process itself is one where you expect that the other will not do something stupid to the blockchain, but instead respect his mining costs. But if you are a government and bring an NSA super-farm online, and don't care about "mining costs", well, you can fuck up every PoW blockchain on the planet because cryptocurrencies have not been designed to withstand such an attack. And if you have money to spend, you can fuck up every PoS blockchain. And if you have money to spend, you can also sybil every transaction, including Cryptonote.
Would I like crypto to be more sound? I would. Would I like people to take its security more seriously? I would. That's not what we have though and I'm not seeing many working towards this direction.
Yes I agree that at the mining level or forking the block chain with enough computational power is an issue (inherent with any coin using a similar consensus model for verification of transactions), BUT that is not the issue we are discussing as that is merely determining the block/ledger for which a coin stores transactions. The item of topic was "privacy" and how Dash's approach has been an "attacker economist" approach.
The focus of the paper was on breaking cryptographic KEYS and the analogy being used specifically targeting the privacy system Dash has put into place.
Trying to solve the privacy problems in a way that relies on the honesty and opsec of a small group of individuals is simply privacy theatre, no different from those that claim that Bitcoin is private as long as there's no address reuse.
This ^ has really nothing to do with mining. But rather the algorithm put into place being "just good enough" from a "attacker economist" point of view concerning PRIVACY.