Quote from: asdfghj on January 11, 2014, 05:38:11 PM

I was musing today about where mining will end up, and how governments will be involved. Any thoughts on the feasibility of this sort of government miner distribution (below) and whether there is a future market here?

This is a solution I feel the community is looking for - a small RaspberryPi-esque device which allows me to host a full node apart from my main PC. Ideally such a device would have some small amount of mining power, to distribute voting on the protocol rules throughout the network but I am not sure what type of adoption would be needed to take any percentage of the network hash rate away from institutional miners. But lets think about it.

In the end game mining chips are going to hit a ceiling and technology will advance slower than today.

Governments with a vested interest in Bitcoin may find it beneficial to distribute these slow-hashing nodes to the population and provide a tax credit to pay for part of the electricity. This could use previous generation tech and still make an impact:

Current hash rate: 15,000,000 Gh/s
Population of france: 65,700,000

To get half the network hash rate each person would need to poses ~250Mh.

About 1 AM USB Block Erupter seems like a lot but as asics catch up to current chip-fab technology improvements will slow: the previous gen tech will have an impact much longer and be cheaper.
What other benefits might this have? Well France would secure 50% of mining fees for its population. The network (and France) would be more protected from the attack of another nation state. Decisions about the protocol would be distributed away from mining pools and miners, further increasing network trust.

So many things improbable in this scenario its really not worth addressing them all. If a gov had a vested interest in btc you could bet your ass they wouldn't waste money giving out rasp pies with usb block erupters. The whole point of btc is to avoid some sort of complex gov controlled scenario just as you described.