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 price.
Meaning, every bitcoin mined costs more money than it brings in.
How many home users do you think will go in the hole even $1k every month for 1 to 2 years to save btc.
With Food and energy prices still increasing, odds are they won't be able to afford it,
many normal business are already shutting down from just the normal energy they use.
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.* And you are forgetting that if big players do drop out difficulty goes down, and as it does the home / small miners will if not make a profit will not incur a noticeable loss.
You also do not seem to understand the amount of people who are mining with fixed infrastructure power costs.
Or the bottom of the mountain wind turbine miners in CA.
Or overnight hydro mining, it's not like a river stops flowing when everyone goes to sleep at night and power use drops.....
And so on.