That NY Times article implying China has too much power brings up an interesting point about PoW. If China is the marginal cost and manufacturing leader of the world, any open entropy system that relies on the same externalities should exactly mirror it.
So it's not an actual PoW or Bitcoin problem, but a real world problem...
I can't be sure, but I am pretty sure that I have known about Bitcoin longer than you have. The first Bitcoins I bought, were priced something like $3.70. I bought them to buy shit from Silk Road, way back in late 2011. Back then, Bitcoin was billed as a totally decentralised digital currency, controlled by nobody, and maintained by guys just like you and me, who would run the Bitcoin program on their computers, where we would each have a copy of the blockchain stored, and where we could then easily and at ultra low cost, ping Bitcoin around the world, or to each other, to pay for any manner of good or service imaginable.
5 years down the line, the blockchain is the best part of a 100Gb, 80% of the p2p network is contained within huge warehouses, packed with processors, raping energy at an alarmingly high rate, soon to be demanding a minimum cost of $500 per BTC (for those miners getting dirt cheap energy in China), just in order to make it worthwhile for these massive operators to keep running. Meanwhile, what can anyone actually do with Bitcoin beyond trading it? In reality, for most people in the moneyed West, the only situation that is advantageous for for using Bitcoin, is to buy drugs with.....
...neat idea, but things aren't quite working out as well they might have done, back to the drawing board perhaps?