mzdubrov

It's pretty well established that CAPEX is the source of security in PoW not OPEX. See our paper and papers like

httpss://uncommoncore.co/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/A-model-for-Bitcoins-security-and-the-declining-block-subsidy-v1.06.pdf

Actually, electricity rates drop with economies of scale and willingness to set up in remote areas.

Have you looked into mining Bitcoin with GPUs lately? You would need free GPUs and free electricity to justify the effort to set it up...

BTC is only profitable with a. ASICs b. Very cheap energy source

Same is increasingly true for other coins.

Hey, MD here... You are right that these tradeoffs are difficult to engineer.

However, it's easier to make it work on top of a more radical shift in hardware. At the basic level, we are just using simple random matrix-vector mults. Of course, the photonics or other analog low-energy approaches have to win in the market for this operation, and that will be tested empirically (though there has been a ton of investment into this kind of processing going analog as we discuss in the paper).

For existing PoW, proximity to cheap energy is required before anything else.

The ratio of HW cost to energy use is different for each computing platform and depends on algorithm etc. For example, it seems Cuckoo Cycle PoW has somewhat higher capex/opex in ASICs because of the heavy memory use.

For photonics the ratio changes significantly due to fundamental physical properties of analog computation, photons vs. electrons and so on.

Anyhow the process of the Si Photonics (and memristors/other analog approaches to AI) maturing to the same degree as digital ASICs will likely be long and gradual so this isn't a practical issue for next decade.

Yes, more HW would be purchased.

There's much less embodied energy in $1 of chip (especially cutting edge HW where you are covering R&D) than in $1 of energy.

Also once hardware (access to capital much better distributed than access to huge quantities of discounted power) is purchased it's portable and condensed. Much better for decentralization.