What I'm suggesting basically means the same hardware will yield the same profit whether it's used for mining now or 10 years from now, because every contributed hash will always have the same return over time (CPU mineable forever?). I'm guessing this would also reduce the profit incentive for special hardware manufacturing.
I don't get it. How does manufacturing an ASIC that hashes 1000x more efficiently than a CPU not have a high profit incentive if rewards are tied to hashes?
I'm assuming there would be no
increased competition to "win" blocks if the same asic is just as profitable today as it will be tomorrow (ignoring speculative coin value). If the hardware race is truly a product of bitcoin's manufactured scarcity (a growing network competing for a decreasing reward), then assigning a fixed value to every hash would remove scarcity from the equation. More hashes is still better, but there's no more race to dominate the network.
However, I'm simply thinking out loud and could be completely wrong about everything.