What's your point? Who suggested you couldn't? The point was about hardening Bitcoin's network from attack. You conveniently omitted from the quote the statement about considering future nation-state attacks and censorship.
I was referring to the fact that it can't be a currency if users can't transact. Unless any entity can gain a large majority of control of the network, they cannot censor Bitcoin effectively. The point is, if an average joe can run a miner without any issues, cost, profitability, etc. Isn't it more likely for governments, who have vast amount of resources to be able to better obtain more hashpower than most people.
Yes. And marginal miners who can't cover their overheads shut down. The difficulty will only adjust downwards until an equilibrium is met and the trend reverses. That's the entire point of the difficulty adjustment algorithm. If mining speculation far outpaces price discovery, marginal miners shut down. This isn't a permanent situation.
The marginal miners who can't cover their overheads are likely the small-time miners first. Mining farms would make it such that unless one has a cheap electricity, they cannot profit.
Re-read what you quoted. Coins I mined years ago have ROI'd many times over. You're only thinking in terms of someone who immediately dumps to cover all overheads. You say you're talking about long term profitability when you're actually referring to short term profitability.
So that's under the assumption that Bitcoin will increase far above its current price point? Is it more profitable to buy ASICs and then mine than to just buy Bitcoins directly?
No one said it wasn't more profitable just to buy bitcoins. The theme of this thread is concentration within the mining ecosystem. Hence "consider it as an investment in the currency, since decentralized mining is required to secure Bitcoin from majority-miner attacks." The implication is that a casual mining investment will be less profitable than merely buying bitcoins. But merely holding bitcoins also gives you no say over the network. Only economically important (transacting) nodes and hash power is relevant to consensus change.
Yeah, I get the point. I still don't get why is it rational for normal users to be mining Bitcoins, at an economic loss without actually gaining anything. Big players have far too much hashpower than the users themselves. Sure, the network would be decentralised if everyone is mining with a significant hashpower but the cost of it makes it unreasonable for anyone to do so. There's no incentives for any mining farms to execute a 51% attack or anything similar.
Again, you are only thinking in terms of never-ending difficulty increase (sort of like a never-ending bull market). If you think mining speculation will always look like the 2013-2018 period, I think you are gravely mistaken. That's not how markets work.
It's predicted that ASIC fabrication will become more competitive in the future, as optimizations become increasingly difficult. That can significantly level the playing field vs. players like Bitmain.
For example:
[The 14nm chip] is a very good thing for decentralization, explains Antonopoulos. What it does is it extends the shelf life of mining equipment from 2-3 months of useable life cycle to almost two years, which levels the playing field among all participants in the system.
You're also only thinking in terms of the current pool ecosystem, as if it's static. Pool incentives can certainly evolve over time to address the needs of miners. Like the exchange system, all current market participants flood to only a few entities. That may not always be true, especially if the interests of pool miners begin to diverge significantly from those of operators of prominent pools.
I don't get the last part; can't the miners themselves just run their own node? They never needed a pool for them, antpool is ran by bitmain and so on.
Yeah sure, it may attempt to level the playing field. However, you have to keep in mind that most farms have access to cheap hardware and electricity that makes it suitable for mining.