Quote from: dooglus on May 16, 2016, 11:07:57 PM

...

No, of course not. We are talking about patents, not the price of power.

If you're choosing to mine in a place where you're paying so much for your power that you can't compete, that's your choice. It is also a separate issue from whether Bitcoin mining should be patent-encumbered.

If you're choosing to mine in a jurisdiction in which said patent is registered/effective that you can't compete, that's your choice. I hear Somalia don't give shit about no patents.

Subsidised power price and patents are not that much different. Former incentives centralisation of hash-power in one state (right now Chinese gov can seize control over miners/pools quite effortlessly, if they only choose to do so), the latter could give control to one commercial entity (depending how are they going to play it).

I'm not saying AsicBoost should be allowed, but there's some serious inconsistency here, and it's not even the first patent relating to ASIC mining, BitFury had one (specialised, more efficient chip) but somehow no one have seen any major problem with it back then.

PoS is starting to look less ugly...