Fantastic coverage as usual, Chris.

The investor view of the 51% attack is a good angle to report on. You’re right; the coverage in most places seems to focus on the technical info because a lot of people don’t fully understand how it works.

Since you talked about one of the fundamentalists pieces of PoW and consensus, and mentioned that the incentive to carry out a double spend is reduced by the fact that the attack itself reduces the market value of the coin, I would say there are two additional things investors would want to know

One is what to do. I think it’s important that people know NOT to spend or move their ETC during this crisis. My understanding is - the older your transaction (ie the more blocks between present block and your block), the harder it is to double spend tour coins. Since many people may freak out with this news and worry that price might decline further, they may be tempted to sell it quick, or move it somewhere. Doing so puts their transaction at risk, and the larger the transaction, the more attractive it looks to the attacker. The investor should weigh this risk against the potential gain or protection from loss they think they’re going to get by selling or moving.

The second is - if the incentive is to not do an attack, who benefits from this attack?

One thing I noticed immediately were the flurry of tweets in response to the attack announcement that mentioned XRP. It really seemed a major anomaly to have so many tweets saying things like “this wouldn’t have happened with XRP” and the like.

Another thing I looked at would be the EthHash algorithm - how many other coins use it, and could they benefit from miners abandoning ETC and moving to another coin using same algorithm?

Next item was the irony of rolling back the chain. As many might remember, the DAO hack long ago was the catalyst for the fork that created ETC, and the major rift was about whether or not a chain should administratively remove transactions on a chain or just let them be. ETH took the admin change road and ETC took the let things be road. So, with a 51% attack, ETC is faced with a decision to roll things back or not, which could be an incentive for some.