It would probably create an entire new wave of miners. Lower power, low noise, perfect for home mining. Perhaps get back to the rack mount style like the antminer S2 / Spondoolies tech miners so people could place it in their equipment racks and nobody would know the difference.
Yes, the governments could play whack-a-mole trying to find it all but it would never happen.
Since BTC is for people to do with what they want, it can be a store of value, it can be a hedge against inflation, it can be an investment, it can be a cash replacement. It can be whatever you want it to be. And if someone does not agree, fine you don't have to agree it's what YOU want, not what THEY want.
-Dave
Precisely. People are forgetting about the difficult adjustments. If large-scale mining businesses would be ruled out, then it would be highly more viable for at-home miners. There's a reason it was designed this way — for Bitcoin to work regardless if there was a huge censorship campaign for large-scale miners.
More people are forgetting that as energy rate keeps increasing, the cost of the energy to mine a bitcoin is exceeded by the energy purchased.
Meaning, every bitcoin mined costs more money than it brings in.
Giant mining firms can offset their loss in profit by going to the outside financial sector for capital investment.
Home users can not get a major capital investment on a whim, because to be honest their operations will be too small to ever profit mining bitcoin.
Bitcoin is only more profitable than the energy used for ~ 6 months every 4 years, the rest of the time , it is in the hole.
* Due to the aging Baby Boomers, the capital investment is already in decline, so even the big boys are not going to be able to offset the costs anymore like in the past.*