at this point it's safe lettin all them flock to whatever boatchain they want.
the original bitcoin, democratical-fud-resistant will certainly not die.
and as a ex-miner, i'm seriouly considering buying some cheap gear to mine real bitcoins once they gone, maybe making a nice pool too for die hard libertarians - if anyone is interested..
mining shall be profitable again for decentralized individuals that dont fall for the mainstream-socialist-saving-the-world-with-coffee-tips-noobs-fudsters.
I could be.
I hypothesis that if the blockchain itself forks, each branch will have it's own difficulty. Therefore the mining effort on each chain will form a ratio which approaches the ratio of the market value of the coins from said chain.
To attack a chain in a primitive 51% mode, an attacker needs to overcome the honest mining effort on a chain, then attack for long enough to cause a problem. AND hope that the management of the chain is caught flat-footed and cannot take evasive action.
I noticed with delight that Blockstream was smart enough to set expectations of reliable peg operations at something like 24 to 48 hours. What this mean is that a successfully 'primitive' attack would necessitate giving away any proceeds which could be obtained mining honestly for a fair amount of time.
Unless, of course, the attack was externally funded which is entirely possible. If a sha256 miner is already in a idle mode due to unprofitably, it is entirely possible that a sponsor could retain them as mercenary to carry out attacks for not a lot of money. The long operations cycle means that there is a fair amount of time to mount a defense.
Most importantly, if sidechains were developed under and expectation of the long reliable peg operation cycle, they would be designed to operate autonomously with only a limitation to elements associated with their peg operations. This means that end-users on various sidechains would probably not even know that an attack on the backing store were underway. Contrast this with the grief which would be felt by XT users who demand real-time operation of their system with no downtime. Much more brittle.
In short, mining could become interesting again, and especially if there was a transaction fee reward to those who find valid blocks in a sea of invalid blocks during an attack. I never found mining to make much sense from an economic standpoint. Warfare on the mining front could change that, and if transaction fees alternate hash algorithms came into the picture it could become both very interesting and potentially profitable.
