The funny thing is that even if you found some magical hardware that was 100x more efficient than the next best thing, the incentives make it so that you don't

The funny thing is that even if you found some magical hardware that was 100x more efficient than the next best thing, the incentives make it so that you don't want to use 0.01X energy to produce Y hashes and mine the same proportion of coins, you'd want to use X energy to produce 100Y hashes so you mine a larger proportion of coins.