Howdy Cameron,
Thank you for taking the time to write such a detailed reply. Here are my thoughts on the main points.(AI summarized my thoughts)
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Stakeholders. I agree that exchanges, ETF issuers, custodians, and academia hold large stakes in Bitcoin. However, this paper is grounded in miners, which I regard as the primitive of the Bitcoin network. I cannot reliably model the behavior of the surrounding entities, and I do not know their exact incentive structures, so premature speculation could blur the direction of the paper and lower its quality. Entities other than miners and users are applications built on top of Bitcoin’s base layer, so I believe the primitive should be analyzed first.
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Dark capacity. Reserve capacity could indeed be switched on to raise the hashrate when needed. But an attacker can do exactly the same, so this becomes a different game from the one analyzed here. I think it belongs to a separate game-theoretic setting rather than to this paper’s analysis.
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Eclipse attacks. I find this discussion productive. If someone writes a paper on network-level attacks on Bitcoin, I believe this line of thought could provide great insight.
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Common knowledge. I do not have a firm view on this part yet.
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Framing. Rather than a limit case, I see this work as an analysis of the primitive element of the Bitcoin network. Only after the problem posed in this paper is resolved can the higher-layer games, such as stakeholder defense or eclipse scenarios, be meaningfully tested on top of it
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Future work. If you could organize a few concrete items, I wou happy to investigate them on my own. As you noted, this paper deliberately takes a conservative approach, so I think the risks discussed abo be better analyzed in a separate, connected paper.
Thanks again for the discussion.
Regards,
Junhyuk.