Thus the only Schelling point (aka focal point) is to stay in the real legacy Bitcoin and sell the free options on the clones.

I wrote on BCT in March 2017:

Because there's no more fun than to get your co-whales dump on the wrong chain…

Surely they can attempt that but they have the prisoner's dilemma that the miners can then debase them to hell, because they already proved to each other that they are duplicitous.

So the fools die in their own tarpit as always.

In other words, once some whales defect, they defect from ever (then or in the future) preventing a mining cartel from fucking them over. Thus they will have destroyed the perceived value of Bitcoin which is its immutability (remember Bitcoin is modeled on Nash's Ideal Money).

I wrote on BCT in April 2017:

Overwhelming consensus only exists on those things which benefit everyone pretty much equally, which was precisely the point that @dinofelis and I made about the game theory of PoW being crab bucket mentality.

And that is why you'll never see any consensus on block size or SegWit, other than to defend the status quo which is the Schelling point of the whales (i.e. pull everyone back into the crab bucket so nobody gets an "unfair" advantage).

Schelling point. Learn it.

I think the current “consensus” on the SegWit fork off from Satoshi’s Real Bitcoin is a Trojan horse to enable a scheme and will not hold up.

Excerpted from the (not yet published) 2016 rough draft of my Bitnet consensus algorithm white paper:

5.5.3 The One Chain That Rules Them All

The more plausible PoW security issue is that in a pragmatic sense really only “the one chain that rules them all”^{[^kinghash] [^difficulty]} has an asymptotic probability of 1 for transaction finality.

The vulnerability is even more plausible for “ASIC-resistant” PoW designed for general use computers, because of the very low hashrate as a portion of total computational capital.

^{[^kinghash]}: Paul Sztorc. One Chain to Rule Them All. Truthcoin.info blog, §Only Bitcoin’s Hashrate Stands a Chance, Mar 7, 2016.

^{[^difficulty]}: Mircea Popescu. The woes of Altcoin, or why there is no such thing as “cryptocurrencies”. Trilema.com blog, Aug 16, 2014.