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 where there is unused power generation that can't go anyplace else.
https://decrypt.co/98424/bitcoin-firm-crusoe-energy-raises-505-million-grow-flare-gas-mining-businessOr 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.
-Dave
You seem to be forgetting it takes 2 weeks for the BTC PoW difficulty to reset.
As observed from other coins, that had a major drop off of miners,
It could take six months for the difficulty to drop low enough for a home miner to actually mine a block.
You think the public will wait patiently or the exchanges will just go , we wait no problem,
I don't think so.You're kind of missing the reality that is heading toward you this winter.
There is not going to be any excess power generation,
the majority of hydro is about to shut down due to world wide droughts,
no water no power no food. Time to wake up Dave.
If you have ignored the price of natural gas skyrocketing cost in Europe,
you realize that those flaring gas, instead of selling it, are going to lose money instead of making it.
The larger profit will be from selling natural gas, not burning it to lose money mining btc.
In the world we are moving into, reality returns ,
UNPROFITABLE VENTURES will be discarded for Profitable Ventures.
If you think btc PoW mining will be profitable , knock yourself out, you'll find out the hard way soon enough.
PoW fatal flaw, the PoW network fails when the cost of energy exceeds it network maintenance cost and their is no outside capital investment to keep it on life support.