Yesterday the chains have split and we now have a ABC and a SV chain. Both chains are at this point incompatible with each other and a public reorg is no longer possible. The fork went very smooth without any complications.
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So story settled and time to move on? Not yet.

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Before the fork the SV team claimed to have a massive advantage in hash power and that the miners should decide. They wanted to fight for Nakamoto Consensus and up to this point failed horribly. Will they give up and declare SV dead? I highly doubt it.
Instead I think they were simply bluffing and have some different plan for the war.

Miners vs Community

The Miners make the blocks and that gives them a lot of power, but there are a lot of things they cannot do. For example setting the price. SV is not valued that much by the community so there is really no reason to blow massive hash power into the chain. Even when they would mine twice as many blocks, that would change exactly nothing but their rhetoric. They just have a massively overmined chain where the miners loose money.

So I find it not surprising that giving the lower price of SV the hash rate is lower. That is what a rational actor would do. In the end the miners have to follow the market and their hashing cannot drive up the price.

But miners are not powerless

While miners cannot make the price go up, they certainly can let the price go down. There are some possible attacks that all rely on having 51% hash power. Below that you are just an annoyance but not a threat.
The most devastating one is a secret chain reorg. In that attack dishonest miners try to mine a second chain in secret and publish that one if they feel they have a big enough lead in PoW. This chain is not the official consensus chain and all transactions that were in the old chain could be replayed or double spend. Some will not be able to be replayed when people are quick to move their funds and all of the commerce done on that chain will be left hanging in the air. This is an absolutely disastrous attack that will sink the price.

The big problem with such an attack is that as a shadow miner you need to commit to the attack and cannot exit without taking a total loss. If you misestimate your hash power and end up a few percent short, you waste all your effort and have to eventually give up with nothing to show for your spent electricity. It is a very high risk strategy.

Less risky is a censorship attack. In that case you do not reorg the chain but start attacking at the current head mining only empty blocks and orphaning all other blocks. This attack is much less disruptive and it is immediately public. Everyone knows but you can stop at any time and have caused some disruption. No double spends though, just freezing the network for some time.

In both attacks the attacker will loose money as honest mining is always more profitable. But the bad miners can discourage honest miners and disrupt the chain and that might be worth their loss.

The plan for attack

One of the reasons why SV is far behind mining blocks might be that they are preparing such a shadow reorg. This is certainly possible and I would remain very careful moving ABC tokens right now.

But there is a second much more likely explanation. They are just bluffing this attack and secretly mine BTC with their remaining hash power. As I stated above there is really no reason to sink a lot of hash power into a quite worthless SV chain, so they do something else. And because they have announced all kind of attacks the smartest plan is to not attack and let ABC do stupid thinks trying to protect from the attack that is not actually happening. Instead you just relax and make money.
The real attack might then come in a few month when nobody expects it.

Defending the attack

In the end I think such an attack is not good for either party. Because when SV successfully reorgs ABC, what do they gain. Do they think the people that lost their money will then go and buy SV? Certainly not, they will get BTC which is much more resilient due to the much higher cost of starting a hash attack. Or maybe a POS coin? Everyone may spent a lot of money attacking a chain, but it is not clear to me how they would benefit.

ABC centralisation

But just the threat of such an attack is a good weapon, that costs zero and has an impact. Out of fear of a reorg, ABC has introduced centralised checkpoints, and that may weaken their coin. If SV is just mining bitcoin secretly I would say they played it well so far.

ASIC vs Non-ASIC

This situation leads to a very interesting question. What would happen it the case of a deep reorg and what is the proper way to deal with it.

Quite certainly the attacked coin would fork trying to save the old consensus chain. This is not the official way to deal with it, but it also happed in ethereum and I expect no different reaction here. The threat of such a fork alone is discouraging shadow attacks.

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But looking at the tech part:
-Non-ASIC algorithms have that advantage that everyone can join in and extra hash power may be found to revert the reorg without a fork. It is much harder for the attacker to estimate how much power they need and where they can realistically start their reorg.
-In ASIC coins the miner has to commit to that hash algorithm by investing in specialised hardware. If a reorg happens one may switch the mining algorithm and financially burn the attacker much more, but also the own miners.

At this point I have no idea what is more secure, but both have advantages.

There is another option, introduce a floating 15 block or so checkpoint. Any reorgs that go deeper than that will be rejected by consensus. Of course this brings its own problems that the nodes need to timestamp and that is not decentralised. So the chain may fall out of consensus. In practice this is probably only a little concern as such deep reorgs never happen under normal circumstances.

SV

Let me conclude by commenting on the name SV. If they are actually attacking other coins, their name is a joke. The vision of Satoshi was to create a public network that is naturally resistant to bad actors. If they manage to sink ABC, then they have proven that Satoshis Vision failed and we need to improve on it. They affectively destroy their own legitimacy when they succeed. That sounds like a bad business plan, but for the rest of us it is certainly interesting to learn what happens in this war and find solutions should some other actor eventually plan to attack BTC in the future.
I am hoping for a proper hash war and a secret reorg to learn from it, even though I think I is just a bluff to make ABC do stupid thigs (which they do) and SV was happy from the beginning to fork into two functioning coins.