... I think a large enough economic majority will make the current miners come along in a UASF. The miners have no interest in mining worthless coins after all.
Sturle, I am not an expert cryptocurrency programmer, but on the topic of business I feel qualified to comment: as a KnC exec said during their company's dying swan song, it's unlikely the Chinese mining operations would be able to operate at their margins unless the Chinese miners receive virtually unlimited funding from a state-level entity (e.g. the government of China or perhaps the PBoC).
I doubt that, but it is a different issue. I don't think we should base an altcoin on a conspiracy theory.
In my view, the best way to remove Bitmain and other tyrants (for a year or two) is to have the full PoW change, rather than having 50% SHA-256 and 50% a new algorithm.
My point is that you can't
change the POW in Bitcoin. You can make a new coin with a different POW, and you can even carry over all the coins fro Bitcoin in a genesis block or whatever, and fix everything else which is wrong in Bitcoin in the same go, but you can't
change the POW agorithm. It is impossible. It will become a new coin either you want to or not, It is just as stupid as those scammers who pretend it is possible to increase the blocksize in Bitcoin. It will become a new coin either you want to or not.
The only way to upgrade the POW while keeping Bitcoin Bitcoin, is to add an extra POW as a soft fork.
I see there are mostly newbies posting in this thread. Perhaps you should take some time to educate yourself about how bitocoin and blockchains work.