This is my thinking too. If you are a nation state, and want users to distrust the network, why not just spin up a bunch of miners to attack it and/or regulate white markets?

More direct and easier to attack than 1) trying to figure out if a double spend bug even exists in the first place and 2) secretly double spending low amounts slowly over time that would have virtually no affect on price which means no users would even know. If it isn't enough to change anything does it really matter?

Bribing the merchants would leave a "paper trail" or "finger print" of sorts as just a few merchants who receive such an offer but reject it or merchants who accepted but defect later, would be loose ends. Way too much investment in people and messy people management.

Several strategic blows to undermine it would be hands of with little pointing back to the attacker.

Where would you hear the complaints ? Reddit censors negative comments, twitter is bots and noise... One out of every thousand small amount double spend is millions of dollars in the aggregate on a long enough timeline, but not individually painful enough to alert anyone.

You cannot prove to me that this is not happening, not even in a round about way through inference the way moneroinflation .com can show inflation is not taking place.

That is all the evidence i need to make my case that this is an issue.

With Bitcoin, ( or more accurately public ledger blockchains, i'm not shilling Bitcoin vs Monero) anyone can know where and when even dust is lost.

The earliest way we would know is by repeated reports on forums of issues. Then we run into more problems:

How long has this been going on ? How can we even check ?

Are these reports trustworthy or an attack ?

For instance, certain users are less likely to report anything in the first place; persecuted substance users and sellers, small holders.

The reporting venues themselves are numerous and i've noticed we rely on certain people to crosspost news (such as about haveno) from simplex, matrix, reddit, nostr, monero, twitter.

Several fresh accounts with few followers could post a complaint on each of those platforms every day for months and no one would notice. The sub-Reddit is censoring unfavorable posts about Monero, and so its "news" is skewed. Monero town and Matrix a are a pain to sign up for.

So a sub-group of a sub-group will even know.

What if everyone was looking at the Black marble flood attack but ignoring the frequency of reorgs during that attack?

Something like moneroinflation .com having a reorg tracker, with report inputs from accross the network to account for local signal decay bias might be useful, but still, even with active pattern seeking, it's the type of attack that majority hash can carry out in very very small doses, say, only on purchases of a few cents, that in the aggregate amount to thousands.

Then at some juncture of weakness for the network, like a network upgrade or contentious fork: Bam: and in the chaos no one knows whats going on long enough to lose maket cap and users that will never return.

Again, i'm looking for a technical reason majority hash could not be held by a single entity right now accross the several trusted pools, and what they could do if they did , and how we would even know.

I'm looking through historical posts with similar questions but not finding good ansers, maybe i will eventually.

Any standard reply, such as : it is unlikely, why would they, or we would find a way to fight it, while possibly true, is cope as far as i'm concerned.

Btw P2pool solves the custodial payout issue of trad-pools, but as far as i can tell, it does not prevent the coordination of individual nodes behind p2pool.