If you wanted to upend Core, then you should have more competent people who would have advised you that unbounded block size doesn't have an equilibrium.
If you have successfully demonstrated that unbounded block size cannot reach an equilibrium
outside a majority-collusion environment, I have missed it.
Yes you missed it. ...
Once we do model differing orphan rates for different miners, then the optimal strategies for mining come into play. And if you work out the game theory of that, you realize that
collusion and centralization are the only possible outcome.
So you seem to be acknowledging that I am correct above...
You are making a similar error as those two others did upthread. A 51% (or even 33% selfish mining) attack is not a change in protocol. In other words, in BTC the miners can't make huge blocks, because it violates the protocol limit of 1MB.
Collusion is collusion, irrespective of the protocol. Nakamoto consensus is only possible when a majority of participants are 'honest' as per the whitepaper terminology. Unbounded blocks does nothing to change this.
And as a practical matter, Bitcoin operated just fine for multiple halvings with no practical bound on blocksize.
There was minimum advised fee and there were pools doing anti-spam such as I think I've read that Luke Jr's pool rejected dust transactions.
Yes, minimum
advised fee. 'Advised', as not encoded within the protocol. The fact that this worked up to the point that the production quota was finally persistently hit forms an existence proof that the system
can work. The fact that it
did work may or may not have something to do with all players having beneficial intent, but there it is. Indeed a populist sentiment includes the notion that it is against the best interests of all participants to do anything that kills the system. Which probably explains why our past known-majority miner (Discus Fish?) turned back from their position of mining majority without ever forming an attack from their assuredly-successful posture.