If you're even considering buying dedicated mining hardware, you're already way more specialized than the average user of Bitcoin. Diseconomies of scale at the

If you're even considering buying dedicated mining hardware, you're already way more specialized than the average user of Bitcoin. Diseconomies of scale at the high end don't stop Bitcoin mining from being an extremely unequal gated community relative to the average user with a smartphone in their pocket. In fact, this is the main reason why the Bitcoin core development team has largely rejected proposals to, say, determine acceptable maximum block size[0] through miner consensus. How much data a miner can process is likely to be far higher than that of casual users, who aren't going to be mining and thus have no franchise. As for the scale issues you mentioned, wouldn't dedicated cooling be more efficient per hash? That's the metric that matters for Proof of Work. [0] Either the base block size or SegWit weight units, both of which are locked at 1kb/4kwu forever.