Is there any measure in place to protect against and recover from a 51% attack by a big enough actor?
I'm specific talking about the spawn camping attack as envisioned by Vitalik Buterin here
https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/11/06/pos2020.htmlIn a proof of work system, if your chain gets 51% attacked, what do you even do? So far, the only response in practice has been "wait it out until the attacker gets bored". But this misses the possibility of a much more dangerous kind of attack called a spawn camping attack, where the attacker attacks the chain over and over again with the explicit goal of rendering it useless.
In a GPU-based system, there is no defense, and a persistent attacker may quite easily render a chain permanently useless (or more realistically, switches to proof of stake or proof of authority). In fact, after the first few days, the attacker's costs may become very low, as honest miners will drop out since they have no way to get rewards while the attack is going on.
In an ASIC-based system, the community can respond to the first attack, but continuing the attack from there once again becomes trivial. The community would meet the first attack by hard-forking to change the PoW algorithm, thereby "bricking" all ASICs (the attacker's and honest miners'!). But if the attacker is willing to suffer that initial expense, after that point the situation reverts to the GPU case (as there is not enough time to build and distribute ASICs for the new algorithm), and so from there the attacker can cheaply continue the spawn camp inevitably.
