In all seriousness apart from the mining hardware race. Mining was a voluntary service given to use bitcoin much like any distributed computing projects that you can participate on using BOINC clients.
Where you get such wacky ideas I'll never know...
Back when CPU's was the thing everyone and their dog would run nodes and self mine before pools.
Simply before the migration from solo mining to pools and CPU's to GPU's and GPU's to FPGA and later ASIC's.