[yanmaani]

> The “fake” chain would lose all honest verifiers (and all transactions from honest wallets?) which seems like it would be pretty detectable with simple statistical analysis. Staked nodes not participating (and active wallets not transacting) becomes less and less likely the longer the post-fork chain is.

But you don't know who's honest - you may as well be saying the real chain lost all the dishonest verifiers.

[clolege]

Exactly - that's where statistical analysis (like fakespot) comes in.

For each chain you'd be able to look at the age, stake & historical participation level of the post-fork participants and get a pretty good idea which (if either) of the chains is real. The absence of honest participants should look a lot different than the absence of dishonest ones.

Granted, this method is not nearly as simple as checking the number of 0s on a hash, but I would imagine it to be quite difficult to circumvent.