I've been thinking about the Segwit donations attack and wondered why the legacy bitcoin MUST go up in value when / if this happens. The reason is this...

The miners who begin this attack will of course want to keep what they've taken so they won't be sending back to addresses held at a "3" or "bc" which would be incredibly stupid. They will send them to non-segwit addresses. This will drain hundreds of thousands of bitcoin within a few hours to the legacy chain pumping up the value of the legacy chain while draining the value of the soon to be forked chain. The panic that ensues will likely see the initial value of the forked bitcoin core tank at first. Can it recover? Would the initial confusion cause the legacy chain value to go down at first, just not as much as core? Maybe a bit or not at all due to the massive concentration of new BTC on the legacy chain.

The elites won't have to worry about the transparency of the base layer. Only those of us with no connections to power will have to worry. So the rest would be kicked off into LN or other chains assuming they survive.

I'm still wondering though what will happen long term as history has shown that a single currency would be an anomaly. What if an alt season returns and it avoids the legacy BTC chain and heads over to something like Monero? If capital controls are in place, how many services are you willing to pay for online that cost more than a fraction of one's physical needs?

If the state isn't able to seize the means of production in time, the risk of a privacy coin taking over BTC as the main unit of account increases. I suspect we will have two worlds, one surveillance based digital panopticon ruled by some future Amazon government entity, and those few outside (the 144,000?).

You do not mean electrical power but apparently rather you mean political power. You seem to be claiming for example the elite can exempt themselves from the FATF regulation I posited?

Right. Political power. But no, they have the law the way they want it.

From the moment the first SegWit donations is spent without a private key, the legacy chain has forked and all the SegWit UTXO are the future property of the miners (as many donations can fit into each block).

I understand. 0.5.3 being run by the miners with their own mempool filling up with segwit donations with the largest UTXO's first in line. "Draining" was just a metaphor to describe the flow of value away from the segwit chain.