In other words, you won't get rich trying to mine bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies from your home. Because if there's money to be made, many others will jump in. To get rich, you'd need some advantage, like incredibly low cost of power.
Proof of Stake currencies do not require more power than a desktop PC or reasonably sized cloud server to run a node. Cosmos (https://cosmos.network/) is one such currency, and Ethereum is moving to a PoS system.
Seems to me it's at least as equitable as PoW. With either one, you get returns in linear proportion to the resources you commit. To the extent that miners have economies of scale, PoS actually does better.
but it distills nicely to a dichotomy of two terms that can easily be discussed on forums by "investors" who do not understand the first thing about the underlying tech they are buying into. So you will hear about it for a while, as being the ultimate game changer no less.
Today, yes. But in the past, all you needed to be profitable was some kind of advantage, such as not valuing your time, a video card that sits around doing nothing anyway, a use for the heat byproduct (such as room heating).
At scale, there are expenses that the hobbyist doesn’t have. The hobbyist already has space, climate control, doesn’t need/get business licenses, etc.
But it can be hard to compete with any trifecta that can scale with cheap land, labour and capital.
Back in the bad old days of only-just-emerging bitcoin ASICs, the equilibrium was distorted by the long lead times for new parts and relatively few suppliers. (For all I know, this might still be the case with new algorithms/new manufacturing process/ASIC generation).
Another interesting thing to consider is that rational miners will often consider applying their hashing power to the coin whose reward/block time/difficulty/exchange rate factor provides the best return (among those that share a PoW).
The fact that hash rate doesn't go down much during halvings or during market crashes indicates that mining is not in equilibrium. I don't think equilibrium has ever been reached since ~2011.
