I argue it it also qualitative because my outputs get mixed in rings without my permission. Thus I can't spend in times of such an attack without incurring the risk that my spend must be unwound. Whether I know an attack is underway is irrelevant.
This is not how it works. Whether your output is included in a mix makes no difference to your ability to spend it. In fact, you wouldn't even
notice either my use of your output or the unwind of my use of your output. It wouldn't affect your transaction at all, nor would the presence of absence of my use of your output as a mix affect your ability to spend now or in the future. You have nothing to fear.
There is one case where it makes a difference. If you spend using my output as a mix, and my output disappears, then your transaction becomes invalid (on the other fork), but you still have your coins. You
still have nothing to fear from this situation, though the recipient, as always, needs to fear a double spend attack in the case of a chain fork. In this case a small number of innocent bystanders may have the opportunity to double spend, although that doesn't guarantee they would do it. In practice many would just a assume some sort of glitch caused the transaction to not go through and resend it.
More vague uncertainty and doubt without some sort of positive statement.
I have described a specific set of steps for an algorithm upthread.
I missed that. Please quote it or summarize it.
I am so hungry. For example, I posited a way to continually increase the difficulty by always structuring the attackers blocks to make the fastest block solutions in the discarded 20% set, thus skewing the statistics of the hashrate. I wrote the caveat that I hadn't studied the implementation to see if this was feasible.
Structured how? Specifically.
Specific, well-supported and well-presented contributions are more valued than vague ones. Always and everywhere.
I agree they are valued, but I entirely disagree they are universally more valuable in every case. Sometimes just the inkling of an incredibly powerful idea is more valuable to me than some implementation of something.
I am 100% sure you agree there are such cases.
Such cases exist. Unfortunately they often are ignored because they don't rise above the noise floor. This is not only not specific to the "culture" of Monero but it is rational and universal and necessary to communicate in a noisy environment. You can't control the noise floor, you can only control the strength of your signal. Please increase it.
Will see if something comes to me later
Now we are getting somewhere (maybe).