> I don't necessarily want to depend on mining rigs

Indeed, the security model provided by Bitcoin consensus system may not be fit for any particular purpose. But it has one, and so we can think about it and decide what purposes it may or may not be fit for, and think about under what conditions it will be safe or not safe.

> is to leave such policy questions up to the market and see what kind of architecture emerges

Users of a system take actions. In your system, it seems, the collective actions of all the users result in an effective security model. You refer to this as leaving it up to the market.

The resulting security model--the conditions of success or failure, the invariants which must hold--may be unknown to any of its participants; it may be even unknowable to any one human mind. It may, and almost certainly will, change over time. A user adopts the system today, but finds tomorrow that it is behaving in a way which was previously impossible, including restrictions being sprung on them later--the possibility of which is a kind of restriction in and of itself.

> Heck, someone might literally replicate the Bitcoin policy and configure their quorum slices to trust 67% of whoever mined a Bitcoin block[1] in the past week.

Even your best outcomes with pinning the state to "real organizations" leave me wanting to cite Jo Freeman's "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" as a source for concerns--but I can't, because by failing to state a specific security model, you have a fully general defense against any attack or failure mode: "okay, don't take that risk, the invisible pink hand can choose another set of tradeoffs instead". As you've helpfully demonstrated above (by claiming to generalize the Bitcoin consensus model), there is no conceivable attack for which you couldn't say the system addresses it, as the security is basically external. In some sense you might as well have just shipped a C compiler, pointed out that it was fully general for whatever the market might choose to do (good or bad), and said it was up to the market.

[[1]As an aside, Bitcoin mining is not just creating identities via hashcash; Blocks commit to the past ledger state-- it's effectively a signature itself--, and this is integral to the security model; without that those identities could concurrently create unbounded conflicting states with constant energy usage. See, https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/pos.pdf for a more complete discussion of the subtle details around that.]

For a market to choose, there must be a choice and there must be intent and understanding. Participants need to be able to trust that their choices are effective and won't be completely undermined by the choices of others, or at least understand how their choices might be undermined and be confident enough that such an outcome is unlikely. For the market to choose, people would need to understand the global ramifications of their actions and the actions of others, but you've seemingly provided no tools to reason about these.

I'm not complaining that there is risk--there is that aplenty, and in Bitcoin too for sure--but that there is no commitment to a sufficiently complete concrete security model at all, which makes the risk impossible to assess. Bitcoin users will also sometime make arguments about the suicide pact of the interconnected economy, but they do that as an answer to what if the first plausible mechanism fails. It probably okay that a system has generality and can potentially fullly accommodate the whim of man, but the more our systems rest on that the more opaque they are in practice.

I really think Stellar should develop and transparently state specific technical 'plan' on how the system should be used-- how trust should be configured globally-- and defend the plausibility and desirability of that model, describe who will and won't have the power to control the system as a result, how centralized it will be, how people can choose to configure their own systems to bring about that outcome, and how we can tell if it has achieved a configuration which can deliver on that plan (preferably before observing a failure). Maybe even multiple such plans, if it were possible to analyze their interactions.

Without that, I can't shake the impression that what you're actually saying isn't 'leave it up to the market' but that instead what you're actually saying is 'leave it up to chance'.