[FlacoJones]

Perhaps I'm missing something but even as a crypto-hopeful this doesn't disturb me too much. Bitcoin et al. is better off without mining becoming consolidated into giant conglomerates.

The vision is for mining to be distributed amongst many small to mid-sized, non-colluding teams, the sum of whose hashpower is still greater than that which could be mustered by, say, a government or bank.

I hope that one day the UX and hardware for mining and joining mining pools becomes so simple and cheap it just makes sense for many semi-technical people to run a node in their home or contribute their compute/storage to distributed protocols. Even have this built into the operating system, with a simple toggle for turning it on and off.

Truly distributed mining is largely a UX problem. I hope that these bans may spur spur development on dead simple mining pools for all.

[aantix]

BTC already is centralized.

Your only real hope for making money is to buy an ASIC miner.

But just try to buy a single unit - they’re either perpetually “sold out”.

Or there’s some guy in another country that will deliver a unit but only accepts payments in Bitcoin. So there’s no recourse if he doesn’t deliver.

[rebuilder]

I don’t see how hashpower consolidation is a consequence of anything other than the usual economies of scale that lead to consolidation in different businesses. A large miner can negotiate better prices for hardware and electricity than a smaller one.

[FlacoJones]

That's exactly it - hashpower consolidation does result from economies of scale.

At least looking at ASIC-resistant mining algos... it would be a hopeful future if we could get protocol-level compute and storage sharing to distributed mining pools, like https://www.nicehash.com/

Until contributing your unused compute and storage is as easy as clicking a toggle, the economies of scale will prevail.

I think crypto + ASIC resistance + seamless edge computing = the original dream of the Internet

[FlacoJones]

TL;DR Maybe regulation of massive mining cartels can have positive externalities by making distributed mining pools more profitable