Ethereum can afford a 51% attack on Bitcoin, and could profit greatly from it

[Lucius]

As an anecdote, when I have talked about working on an attack vector to friends and family, merely the mention of the fact that it could save an electricity consumption the size of Finland's or Belgium's, or whatever it is exactly, immediately makes them quite excited and positively interested in it. Obviously there's a bias here to take into account, but nonetheless I can't help but feel that a large part of the public would be quite positive towards a change from PoW to PoS, and quite frankly perhaps even enough to be in support of Ethereum making a power move on Bitcoin in order to force such a change.

I think we are going in the wrong direction when we push Bitcoin in the direction of PoS if our main motive is to save energy and reduce the impact on the environment. If we look at the objective data, we see that BTC mining is actually very energy efficient and belongs to those activities that make maximum use of renewable energy sources.

Taking examples of countries that spend the same as BTC is quite biased if we do it just because we want to convince someone that ETH is better than BTC in this respect. I agree that PoW is not perfect if we take into account the possibility of 51% attacks, but in terms of decentralization and transaction security, it is a far better choice than PoS.

https://bitcoinminingcouncil.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/BMC-H1-2023-Presentation.pdf

I honestly think you might be right about the fact that if we asked the devs and/or stakeholders right at this moment if they would be supportive of such an attack, their first answer would probably be no.

But on the other hand, I think that with the potential growth of their assets of around 100% or more looming on the horizon, that mentality is bound to slowly change over time, at least for a good portion of the stakeholders.
~snip~

I say let them try, any time and any way - but I'm pretty sure it wouldn't end well for them. In addition to the anger of the majority of the crypto community, they should count on the possible legal consequences that can arise from such actions.