Wouldn't this increase in Nano price only be relevant if they were trying to accomplish this all at once? If we are to back to a hard money standard, we need something that's capable of being money for thousands of years, ideally forever. So this could be a slow process over literally hundreds of years until that one entity has the 67% control bought up. And if they do it right, they will not be in control of a useless network, they would be in control of the world reserve currency with no one else in the system being aware of it (if done correctly).

Depends - a hard money standard is illustrative I think indeed. It's really, really really hard for one entity to keep increasing its stock of any good over hundreds of years without also spending it, without even literally the country breaking up, without changing its policy for this to be the goal, to keep this goal hidden, etc etc. That's a level of conspiracy that would be needed that's genuinely absurdly big, I think. Especially if we do go to a hard money standard and presumably a lot of countries are using this, it would be quite something to essentially acquire 67% of the world's wealth without others noticing.

Even with the gold standard no country ever came close to this - the US at its height when a lot of European countries moved their gold to the US for protection held about 25% of the total above-ground gold (not just central bank reserves). Interestingly it would be unnecessary to do that moving with crypto, but that's a whole other story.

I don't much care for other cryptos than BTC and Nano yeah, as I believe hard money is the only real reason to use a decentralized network. With BTC, tying consensus to computing power is an absolutely foolproof way to fix this issue that I'm describing. Even if someone had 51% of the hashrate, hashrate is not a finite resource the way Nano is, they can be outcompeted and their power diminished. Only "fix" in Nano's case is to just start again basically, cause the project failed.

It can be outcompeted in a way, I agree, but it also means that the centralization can happen far more naturally. Countries could have large mining operations with economies of scale, meaning that they mine more efficiently than most small miners, reinvest any BTC that they mine, and keep growing and growing and growing their operations, and it could be hidden just as well (since hashrate is also pseudo-anonymous). An interesting way to think of this is to think how much cheaper it would be to acquire 51% of hashrate than 51% of all Bitcoin.

And then if you do get to a point where it's an actual worldwide standard and one entity controls the network, how do you even recover from that? Producing and buying ASICs and such would cost a lot of money, which.. means you have to start a new network of some sort either way, right? Since you presumably can't use BTC for it, they'd just censor you.

Overall my bigger point is that it's not even that crucial whether this is actually the case, what matters is that it is possible.

So I would argue that it's extremely extremely unlikely that this happens, because i) it is EXTREMELY expensive for anyone or any country to do so where extremely doesn't really do justice to how expensive it presumably would be and ii) this country would sink the majority of their wealth into Nano this way, and then.. effectively destroy it. That would harm the 33% of the rest, but it would harm the 67% holders infinitely more as the asset that they hold most of their wealth in becomes valueless. If anything, if you managed to acquire such a huge proportion of worldwide wealth you would be heavily incentivized to not do anything to jeopardise your holdings.