My issue with mostly the whole argument is what benefit would a malicious actor have? What kind of a bogeyman is being painted on the wall here?
What benefit would a malicious attacker have? They would have control of a Trillion dollar network. You pointed out some of their abilities further down your post but most importantly, They could double spend. I dont think you understand the trust that would be lost in the system if a large double spend was successful.
What can you do with your hashrate majority? Well, you can double spend your own transactions, you can censor foreign transactions and in essence you will disrupt the coin ecosystem. Particularly the latter won't be for your own benefit, on the contrary! Game theory is against a malicious actor who wants to exploit his hashrate majority. So, what's the fuss about it, unless a malicious actor doesn't care to burn billions of $$$.
Im not talking about game theory. I simply pointed out that the operator of a pool could use their users hashrate maliciously before anyone had a chance to move their hashrate off the pool. Effectively when looking at short term attacks like double spends they do control the hash, not the individual miners. Their incentive to do so is completely irrelevant to my statement. Your fork tracker is useless when a longer chain is being built in secret. Sure the pool might have a few hours of bad luck, but so will the whole network if 51% of the hashrate drops.
I believe this scenario is highly unlikely and an economic suicide, thus the probability of such a malicious investment is neglectable, even for state level actors. Bitcoin is seen as a threat to government money control and the traditional finance system, but not enough to justify to burn billions of $$$ to disrupt Bitcoin.
Really?
Money means nothing to the government. They can print it as they please. Never underestimate what they will do to keep their backdoor inflation tool as the global reserve currency.Do you think someone like Arion Kurtaj would have cared about economic suicide if he got access to a few pools instead of nvidia, uber and the others?
I think there are a lot of scenarios , although highly unlikely where game theory doesnt apply. I dont think people put enough stock in those.