Botnets are not large mining facilities that can be shut down easily.
Indeed they are pretty much the opposite of something that is going to be successfully shut down or even regulated by the government any time in the foreseeable future. If anything that is a lot more like the pot grows mentioned in the OP, which to me seems like close to a best case for decentralized PoW mining. (I'm not sure whether that is better or worse than end users just running a mining client like Bittorrent, but it seems close.)
The pot example/analogy gave me a little chuckle.
But more seriously, I see the same as well. What would be the best case for decentralized PoW mining if the playing field as far as mining is concerned is more "level" or "fair" when comparing CPU vs GPU vs ASICs?
Wasn't there some talk some months back about smart mining integration into the client? That did interest me as it would give the end user the ability to mine XMR in the background with their unused CPU cycles at a much more fair rate than CPU vs GPU in many other coins.
It would be awesome if the decentralized structure of BTC or LTC would be constrained to that level playing field I mentioned earlier.
I was there when LTC had cpu mining. That was an interesting time as I got to get a glimpse first hand how it was to mine with CPUs as opposed to using my gigantic bitcoin mining rigs at the time.
Is there any site or application that is tracking the current number of monero nodes (full nodes) that are on the network?