Bookmarked so I can give this a proper response, but let me see if we agree about some basic principles and terminology: The set of participants who hold hard power over the protocol are the actors who receive coins in exchange for something else. They decide if a transaction is legitimate or not in the same way that the clerk in a shop decides if your banknote is real or not. In your terminology this set of participants is the social layer. Block producers provide immutability as a service. This is what you term the consensus layer. What emerges from the interplay between the two is a market where immutability is traded. The adversary is an actor motivated to attack the market itself and prevent immutability from being traded, except perhaps under certain conditions (e.g. seigniorage, KYC, etc).