Miners Aren’t Friends

You are answering your own question. Suppose someone would invest billions in obtaining a mining rig that single handedly achieves 51% of the mining power of the network, then he effectively kills that network, and makes his investment worthless.

There's a reason the valuations of Bitcoin and Ether waiver every time it seems a pool is coming close to 51% mining power, it's because everyone is scared of what happens when that happens.

In the real world, I think miners approaching 51% of mining power is an accidental and temporary thing. It means that the coin is overvalued, and investors are over investing in mining operations. As the article states, the amount of profit these operations turn really isn't that big. They're operating on thin margins, and operations going bankrupt is not unheard of.

There's simply no reason to go and "own" the network. Best case, you'll turn a loss, worst case, you destroy the network and lose your entire investment.

By that same token, they're not other miners' friends, either. I own three 1070s and a 1060 which I purchased primarily for mining[0] but also because other things I do benefit from the added compute capability. I purchased the first 1070 for less than $350 right after release. I can't find them for less than $400, now.

The funny thing about that is I'm funding my other needs for graphics cards[1] by mining. I wouldn't say I've "paid" $400 for any of them past the first one since all of the others have been funded with mining profits. And I probably wouldn't own three graphics cards were it not for mining.

At some point, I firmly believe, the bubble will pop on all of this and those cards will come back down to earth (I've been saying this for over 4 years, though, and have been wrong for at least that long). Until then, mining to buy video cards is always an option. :)

[0] Mining is kind of a secondary reason. The primary reason is that I wanted to learn CUDA and I know myself well enough to know that if I don't have a project in mind, I will never take the time to learn it, so I set about optimizing an existing CUDA mining implementation and set about learning it successfully.

[1] I play computer games pretty rarely, but I like to fuss around with modeling programs and having a few of these really speeds up rendering in programs that support IRAY. I'm using it for playing with ML code, as well, which wasn't enough of a project to get me interested in learning CUDA, but is enough to keep me interested now that I know the language a bit.

The key difference between Solidity and other languages, of course, is that most people don't trust other languages so explicitly and irrevocably. Other code environments can be monitored for errors and those errors can be corrected, usually in ways that don't involve kissing all the money goodbye.

On something so absolute as Ethereum, I would expect them to use a very dumb language with as few complications and complexities as possible, and then to formally verify the crap out of it, and quickly make it the most consistent, predictable, and stable language on the planet (again, possible only with a very barebones language that does not have complex features). The fact that Ethereum has been around for so many years and this has not happened indicates that it's not a serious platform.

Isn't that incentive enough for any entity to deliberately stay below the threshold? Once they cross it, trust in the network, and thus price, plummets. That's reason enough for most to avoid getting that big.

Who cares about the language when the very premise of the project "code is law" was proven wrong. When the DAO was "hacked" by a "thief", rather than tell people "whelp, code is law and the code executed perfect" the mob (more accurately, those at the top of the etherium pyramid) decided to change history and roll back the blockchain.

Even the language designed to describe the "hack" was garbage. It wasn't a "hack", if code is law, all bugs are code and therefore part of law. There was no "thief" that "stole" anything either. Code is law. Somebody followed the contract down to the letter and made a trade to their benefited. Code is law.

If the central tenant of "code is law" cannot even be held and real meatspace-based humans can modify history at will.... what value does ethereum add at all besides pissing away an unimaginable amount of energy turning non-renewable fossil fuels into heat?

If anybody can modify history.... just use AWS. It's cheaper.