I think you are wrong about this, but only to the extent that current huge subsidies in various forms (I'm including likely corruption) in China become less significant, and also probably assuming ASIC commoditization.*
Eventually you get to a point where even though the waste heat is worth less than the electricity that goes in (as your comments correctly state), using it still adds to you efficiency and not using it will be uncompetitive.
* You and I both view ASIC commoditization is significantly less likely in the foreseeable future than r0ach believes. I may differ from you in that I don't completely rule it out longer term.
The cost of electricity for the corrupt in China can be essentially free (although it may be more at the level of 2 cents per KWH now from what I heard, so that the power players protect their political reputation in case it gets DOXXed). But there needs to be coins paid for mining, so that it is worthwhile to even do that corruption in the first place. Thus unprofitable mining with a tail reward could still be vulnerable, but in my design not so because the tail reward is so small compared to the PoW difficulty supplied by the signers of transactions, that the cartel can't find it worthwhile to do the corruption. I said my design will turn ASIC mining farms into door stops. Do you think it is wise for me to create such a CC and be assassinated? This is not a game we are playing here. This is real life and pissed off oligarchs have their ways of making people disappear.
On the ASIC commodization (
besides that I already pointed out the fact that it wouldn't totally level the time-to-market access and does nothing to account for free electricity charged to the collective), it appears the opposite might occur:
If you don't know what AsicBoost is, in their own words:
AsicBoost is a patent-pending method to lower your total cost per Bitcoin mined by approximately 20%.The key word here is
patent. Such a technology has the potential to dominate mining but patents go against bitcoin's FOSS design. The idea to make AsicBoost's technology impossible to be used on bitcoin has already been
brought up and
embraced by certain Core developers. The reason I'm calling this a dilemma is because
making AsicBoost irrelevant as Peter Todd suggests, would be something inherently illiberal and against free market principles.
What are your thoughts on this?
That Core Dev Central Planner slope sure is a slippery one.
First, centrally planned blocksize production scarcity to incentivize the use of layer 2 and altcoins. Now, doing favors for the chinese mining cartel to protect them from more efficient competition. Then, deleting Satoshi's coins to keep the public "safe"...