that might cause hash rate to plummet and block times to become significantly longer. impatient people might start clamoring for an emergency difficulty adjustment, but a POW change? that wouldn't make sense.

even if the chinese government seized farms, miners, pools, chip fabrication factories, etc and performed sustained 51%/censorship attacks.....the electricity, overhead, and production costs would be real. they couldn't just sustain the attack indefinitely. so ideally there would still be no POW change---we could just let the attackers burn themselves out. i just hope that bitcoiners are patient enough to do that.