I mean you can have nodes, miners, block creation without the dark things you mentioned. Bitcoin price might be lower. But this is hypothetical anyway because

I mean you can have nodes, miners, block creation without the dark things you mentioned. Bitcoin price might be lower. But this is hypothetical anyway because with ASIC mining and dedicated power plants you can’t go back to a low price (other than zero i.e. network trust is lost!). I would imagine even $1000 Bitcoin now would introduce issues of too much hash power. With too much has power and not enough mining incentive in USD terms you’ll just get network attacks.