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I don't think the DAO example gets us any closer to establishing 50% staked as a point of no return. If anything, it demonstrates that social intervention is not determined by what percentage of ETH is economically affected. The DAO involved only a fraction of supply and nevertheless produced a social fork. It also wasn't a case of PoS validators being held accountable for a correlated consensus failure, so I don't think it maps cleanly onto the social-slashing scenario.
My objection isn't “everything below 50% is safe.” I'm asking what specifically makes a highly decentralized validator set structurally unrecoverable as the staking ratio rises. If 60%, 75% or 90% staking creates a credible failure mode where social recovery or validator accountability actually ceases to work, that's exactly the evidence that would make me reconsider issuance. But saying more stakers would have an incentive to resist losses still doesn't mean they form one coordinated majority, nor that the rest of Ethereum must recognize their preferred fork.
And I don't mean that you personally want issuance permanently open to optimization. My point is about the standard we set for reopening mature protocol properties. Saying “there are issues with the current curve and this change improves them” is a much lower bar than demonstrating that the current curve contains a serious long-term protocol defect. That's precisely where ossification matters: eventually “better under some economic model” should stop being sufficient reason to change settled parameters. Bitcoin's declining security subsidy is an example of the kind of structural, specification-level problem that can justify reopening something fundamental. I still don't see Ethereum's equivalent here.

> I think the part I still fundamentally disagree with is the jump from "more than 50% of ETH is staked" to "therefore they are the majority, so this is a point of no return" A majority of ETH units being staked does not create a single coordinated constituency. Solo stakers, LST holders, exchanges, institutions, different operators and different client users do not suddenly become one hive mind with the same incentives, and Ethereum's social layer is not governed by one-ETH-one-vote.
And yet the DAO hack affected just a bit over 5% of ETH and social consensus overrode protocol rules. So it clearly it's not as simple as 50% is still fine because there are different motives between stakers. You don't need to get anywhere close to 50% for a systemic event to happen and for the too big to fail narrative to take hold. If we could design things from scratch I would argue that the stake cap should be set quite a bit earlier to ensure the protocol can hold stakers accountable, but we are where we are and we can only solve things marginally from here.
> What I mostly see so far are arguments about preferred staking ratios, relative returns, dilution and the economics of different staking providers. Those may justify research, but I don't think they are enough by themselves to establish a precedent that fundamental issuance policy should remain perpetually open to re-optimization.
No one is arguing for keeping issuance policy permanently open to re-optimization. I think this is a strawman argument. The argument is that there are issues with the current issuance curve and we can implement a simple protocol change to tackle them and do so definitely. That to me is sufficient justification to look at it. I would not touch issuance policy again unless a new flaw that was not foreseen and required attention merited it. You must ossify as early as possible, but not earlier than possible. Paraphrasing some dude.

Backstory: I used freewallet 10 years ago to transfer eth to DAO before it got hacked. FW is a custodial wallet so I don't have access to the private keys and my eth tokens are still stuck in purgatory until FW support addresses my 10 year support case that has def exceeded SLA
Fast forward to now. I've been receiving these daily messages on eth scan about legacyeth.com which I doubt is legit. Just wondering if anyone else is receiving these messages or has any background on legacyeth.com
Also if there's any other people out there with eth stuck bc of the DAO hack 10 years ago, let me know if you've had any success with custodial wallets or if we're both in the same boat without a paddle. I'm sure there are dozens of us. Dozens!!