You did not "miss" a step in his logic ;-) His logic is full of jumps. Comparing block subsidy to mining investment is ridiculous. They're nothing alike. I'm not gonna go into Chia (not relevant).
> He isn’t a merchant for long. You are making assumptions left & right. Why? He can go set up shop somewhere else, using a new identity.
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If the tx amount is sufficiently large, double-spending could be well worth the trouble for the attacker, even if his own holdings might decrease in value. He can engage in short selling on the side to further profit/offset loss.
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Just because you classify double-spending as “theft” doesn’t make it less effective as an attack vector. You want to ignore it because it doesn’t neatly fit into your “proportionate” argument.

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A coin that has shown to be vulnerable to double-spending is a coin people would lose confidence in. If it can be done once, it will be done again. Doesn’t even have to be the same attacker.
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And again, you still haven't explained why same hardware cost in attack/defense == doesn't contribute to security. All I see is flawed reasoning: "X must be worthless because Y is better"-but that doesn't mean X is worthless. Not to mention, Y is not true!https://twitter.com/evoskuil/status/1029229754933624832 …
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I will try to explain: If a 51% attacker obtains some cheap ASIC's, it is true that he has an advantage. However, it is irrelevant to the security model if the 51% defender is willing to bear the cost of the attack by using more expensive miners (prev-gen/GPU).
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Again, this doesn’t explain how hardware cost contributes nothing to security. These 2 things you’re talking about are completely orthogonal.
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Assuming: (a) avg hardware capacity of X TH/s (b) avg efficiency of Y J/GH Combined with: (c) avg block reward
$R/day (d) 10-min-per-block constraint These 4 factors together create a _market equilibrium_ where there is an optimal level of hash rate (& mining hardware). -
Sure, if the hash rate goes above the optimal level (e.g., in case of an attack), it costs roughly the same to the defender & the attacker, for any extra hash rate. No one disputes that. But that is *orthogonal* to the fact that there is an optimal level of hash rate.
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