Ah I see. It's true, but there's a good chance these optimizations would be discovered independently, progressively and percolate into the ecosystem. Turning to

Ah I see. It's true, but there's a good chance these optimizations would be discovered independently, progressively and percolate into the ecosystem. Turning to ASIC was an "optimization" that was replicated and copied. It's true that there is a lot more secret sauce to optimizing a SNARK, but if mining drives improvement in SNARK efficiency, I would call that a win.