How does optical proof-of-work strengthen Kaspa's resistance to short 51% attacks?

Optical proof-of-work shifts the cost of a 51% attack from ongoing electricity bills to upfront hardware investment — what economists call capital expenses — making it far harder to briefly rent majority hashrate. In standard GPU mining, an attacker can rent computing power by the minute from cloud providers, cheaply controlling the network just long enough to reverse a transaction. With optical PoW, the specialized hardware required is not available on demand, so even a one-minute majority attack becomes prohibitively expensive. The argument matters for Kaspa because if short-burst attacks are impractical, the ~40-second confirmation target becomes genuinely secure rather than merely fast.