[Rmilb]

Longest PoW being the main chain was not described in the context of contentious changes to consensus code. By that definition, a 51% attack that censors transactions would be the longest PoW and be defined as 'Bitcoin'. The great thing about Bitcoin is that the users are able to each make their own decision on what Bitcoin is. Bitcoin needs to be anti fragile and will constantly be under these attacks, because if it fails, we need something better.

This is all new territory and the appeal to authority by citing the white paper is less helpful than most people believe.

[Expez]

You're absolutely correct. The 51% example that you bring up would be an undesirable outcome (from our PoV), but the incentives are in place to ensure that it is extremely unlikely to ever happen.

Distributed consensus is a non-trivial problem, and for sure certain tradeoffs were made by Satoshi to make it both distributed and permission-less.

Unless you want a benevolent dictator of some sort all you can do is set up a system that's robust from a game theory perspective.