> The moment it does you'll be able to tell because Bitcoin will crash to 0.
The "workaround" for PoW is running the PoW computation on hardware that's better suited for the task. Bitcoin mining has been using ASIC for many years now.
Let's say a legitimate user is willing to wait for one minute on a budget phone. Then your PoW is limited to what that phone can compute in one minute. But on the attacker's specialized hardware this computation only costs fractions of a penny, so they are barely hindered by it.
The SHA256 based PoW scheme has a very heavy ASIC advantage. People have tried to design PoW scheme that minimize the custom hardware advantage, but I'm not sure if they managed to close the gap far enough to make PoW feasible for this application.
True, reminds me of the failure of litecoin to make an algorithm that was asic resistant and benefitted normal user hardware, but it didn't last long.
PoW tends towards ASIC capitalization. Theoretically users would ideally pay some cents for a cloud asic to browse in this scheme. Not the ideal early web, but maybe better than dead internet.
The "workaround" for PoW is running the PoW computation on hardware that's better suited for the task. Bitcoin mining has been using ASIC for many years now.
Let's say a legitimate user is willing to wait for one minute on a budget phone. Then your PoW is limited to what that phone can compute in one minute. But on the attacker's specialized hardware this computation only costs fractions of a penny, so they are barely hindered by it.
The SHA256 based PoW scheme has a very heavy ASIC advantage. People have tried to design PoW scheme that minimize the custom hardware advantage, but I'm not sure if they managed to close the gap far enough to make PoW feasible for this application.