"We're not going to 51% attack the network. We're just going to allocate 51% of the hashrate into a single pool to demonstrate that we could 51% attack the network"

Why should this threat of violence be treated differently than the act itself? Miners are threatening to do the one thing their entire existence is supposed to prevent. They're cutting off their noses to spite their faces, instead of enjoying another year or so of profitability

Because whether it’s an attack or not is more to do with the framing than act. If you get all the miners together and can amass 51% of the hash power then you have consensus and have enough control of the network to simply not accept the EIP.

If something like this isn’t possible and you don’t actually need consensus to push through changes then the whole “distributed” part is just a fiction and we’re really talking about a centrally controlled network. Miners are just basically threatening to vote against the EIP if it comes to it.

Threatening to vote against a bill if it reaches the floor in its current form isn’t an attack or violence. It’s just a message that if you want it to pass you should probably change it.

This isn't something new, Bitcoin went through this in 2017 (relevant keywords: UASF, segwit, BCH).

You don't need a miner majority to do fork the chain, both versions (with and without fork) will exist and whichever is most valued by users/the market tends to "win" and bring miners back in because they like money.

Unlike your voting on a bill analogy, the reality of blockchains is that both universes can co-exist.

Calling it a 51% "attack" is like saying Biden "stole" the election by getting at least 51% of the votes. The whole point of a cryptocurrency is that there is no central authority. Vitalik can provide a vision, but he doesn't, and shouldn't want, to control it. If the compute power disagrees with him, then that's just how it's gonna be.

But when we elevate from PoW to PoS the whole point is that compute power won't matter anymore. So a more appropriate analogy would be that if 51% of horse carriage drivers wanted that cars shouldn't be able to drive on roads, then cars shouldn't be able to drive on roads.

> Calling it a 51% "attack" is like saying Biden "stole" the election by getting at least 51% of the votes.

A better comparison would be that a billionaire decided to take over just because he had more cash.

"attack" is a misnomer. 51% is a majority vote.

Yes, but, in fairness, the assumption behind blockchain is that it works as long as 50%+1 of the computation is power is honest, not that any block constituting 50%+1 is necessarily honest/good/correct.

Doesn't the majority vote mean that they get to control the cryptocurrency?

Sounds like an attack to me.

The ice age mechanic remains one of the most significant and overlooked aspects of Ethereum. It's really good.