Why would all the adversarial/competitive pressures tilt the system toward stability and not towards instability?
Discussion
If it becomes a reserve currency, governments will want to ensure no other government or group gets control of the global hashrate. It's basically part of defense spending at that point. And you have 100+ nations contributing to this. Even if mining is not profitable, this would be worth the expense.
💯
This is an argument why governments will resist having it become a reserve currency. Why would you want a reserve currency that you have to have a special set of weapons and a new budget to defend?
The other thing here is that the second the government starts mining with defense budgets every basement miner is just running an expensive heater. All the mining corporations will shut down and we’ll have some form of NATO or OPEC or TPP negotiation the mining which means they’ll be able to enforce sanctions at the drop of a hat.
By this time we’re a bit afield from peer to peer electronic cash.
You think storing gold is free?
Storing gold has relatively fixed and predictable costs. You don’t have to update your vault size to be one brick higher than the vault in some other country. Your threat model involves people who are physically near your vault.
You don't have to be one brick higher than the bext country. One country/entiry can't have one higher brick than all the other ones combined. Not the same thing.
You have to spend enough to protect yourself against any coalition of adversaries who may stand against you. Your adversaries in turn need to be able to spend enough to ward off any attack that you and some of your allies threaten them with which means they have to spend more meaning well now you need to increase your budget because all of your adversaries just increased their budgets and so on und so weiter until you just sort of say gosh I don’t know this game seems kind of silly
And more importantly, do you think shipping gold is free? Actual physical settlement is way more expensive than the 2000 sats it will cost in a bitcoin transaction.
And you just argued that adversarial entities would never cooperate with each other, but now you're claiming they would and that would cause centralization in mining. Pick one. I pick the former and that only strengthens security as outlined above.
The entire field of coalitional game theory is based on the study of when adversaries will collude and when they will not collude. This is a very rich space full of interesting scenarios.