The solvers were incrementally specialized and tweaked toward straight-line solutions.  If you took the dominant bot of the day and ran it as is without the map filtering it would never find a block, because it is trying to optimize traversal onto a straight line.

Bot operators will have to at least revert to the bot implementations from 6-8 weeks ago and re-specialize from there. However, even those bots were designed around filtered maps, so they will under-produce until at least "re-tuned" for the new rules.  Really the entire bot architecture will likely be changed to specialize further to these new rules, probably using some global training instead of the current per-map optimizer approach.


We don't even know that the bot operators all observe this thread.  We can't exactly coordinate with people that we can't reliably contact.


Arguably any miner behavior after the patch will not be able to result in less network security than we have now, so you're right that nobody should care about this aspect, as it is actually a non-issue.


Speculation on a higher future price.  (EDIT: This answer might seem strange to some newer members of the alt scene, who are only familiar with miners who mine to immediately sell.  I know it might seem backwards to these people, but on a good coin miners will gladly (and rationally) even mine at a net present value loss.)


Except that we can't, really.  At least, we cannot come to such an agreement in loose terms on a forum thread - such a social contract would be effectively meaningless.  Even if we got all of the bot operators to agree to such nothing prevents some third party from coming in and capitalizing on the opportunity we'd create by doing so.  The only meaningful way that we can reach such an agreement is via the network consensus, itself, and I just don't see it likely that all miners would agree to simply "leave some margin on the table" like that.  We tried it once, the three "original" dominant bot operators all agreed to throttle their bots for a time and all that happened was more bot operators came online to try to take that margin, leading the rest of us to promptly have to reneg anyway!

You're right in that MOTO bot mining (and really any crypto mining) is an example of an IPD game, you just have the meanings of cooperate and defect a little backwards!  


This would be kind of like convincing everyone to turn off their sha asics from the bitcoin network intermittently. First, "good luck with that" as you'll likely never even get a small fraction of them convinced to do the shutdown.  Second, even if you did it would likely be the demise of bitcoin because in the best of cases the network would fork like crazy at the "turn back on time" but more likely someone would just turn their asic pool back on early to 51% and double spend like crazy.


No, because it is simply not feasible that it could happen at all, let alone happen "smoothly."  It would likely benefit only the first person to go back on the agreement!