Quote from: Welsh on April 22, 2022, 11:01:12 AM

Ideally, we should all have a say, regardless of how much Bitcoin you have or what sort of equipment you have. If you have a good idea, I'd like to think it would be taken into consideration.

It's actually a pretty big topic in legit altcoin projects, which try to implement Satoshi's original '1 CPU, 1 vote' idea as stated in the whitepaper:

Quote from: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

Proof-of-work is essentially one-CPU-one-vote.

I'm not sure anyone really succeeded in doing so; we could argue Ethereum partly does, since GPUs are still viable (even though ASICs do exist) and it's pretty profitable to mine on a home computer, which is great for hashpower decentralization.
However, due to the ability of running tons of GPUs off a single platform, industrial miners still have a way to 'centralize hashpower'. If an algorithm was found that is only able to run on CPUs, it would be best, since if you wanted to run a mining farm, compared to GPU mining, you would need to buy 1 PSU, 1 motherboard, 1 set of RAM for every mining chip (in this case CPU). So needing a whole separate platform for each chip adds a lot of overhead and reduces incentive of building large farms.

An important question though: while something like this increases decentralization, doesn't it also significantly reduce the power put into the network? People who believe mining is wasteful would argue that's a great thing, however it means lower security and easier to attack using a botnet or any other large set of individual CPUs like a manycore cluster. Right?
So maybe the current ASIC landscape might be somewhat centralized, but it allows to pump a ton of energy into the network and gives it such strong security.