Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China

It isn't, but it could be. If we had proper taxes on carbon emissions; The cheapest power would always be from renewables, bitcoin miners would invest in renewable energy which would make it cheaper in the long run as mass production scales with demand.

Energy efficiency is not important in carbon neutral energy production, and in fact can stifle development and raise prices making fossil fuels more attractive.

They already did. Half the crypto ecosystem is already better than Bitcoin if you're trying to build a functional currency. We're talking about a coin that doesn't have any privacy guarantees, it's not exactly hard to improve on that.

When I talk about religious loyalty, what I'm getting at is that it turns out the Bitcoin ecosystem doesn't seem to care that much about stuff like privacy, and whenever anyone brings up Bitcoin's flaws, or the fact that it has been outclassed by other coins, suddenly the conversation is all about "stability" and the trust of having an old coin that hasn't fixed its problems in 10 years.

It turns out that having a fixed number of coins that fluctuate wildly in price is very bad for building a currency, but we have people on here arguing that it's a good thing. It turns out that PoW is unscalable and prohibitively expensive, which is a barrier to real decentralization, but we have people on here arguing that's a good thing. It's understandable that Satoshi didn't know in advance every problem, but it's not understandable that in all of the years since then, the Bitcoin community has largely failed to evolve or learn anything about the initial flaws that the coin had.

And this is honestly a tricky conversation to have because we have to keep dancing around the fact that Bitcoin is a speculative asset and that very little of the community cares about making a currency at all. But the community won't acknowledge that, so instead we get a lot of weird deflection around "stability" and we all have to pretend that the community is in good faith actually trying to create an alternative to cash, and that people genuinely believe that Bitcoin's tech is the best way to do that.

But obviously that's not what's happening. Nobody would really look at the state of Bitcoin and argue that it's best-positioned to replace traditional currency. It's worse than cash for privacy, it has higher transaction fees than almost any other payment method, it doesn't scale environmentally, and it takes 10 minutes to add a new block. But... it is for the moment an excellent speculative investment because the speculative market is irrational and doesn't care about technology. And the speculative market benefits from pretending that it exists for some kind of grand purpose rather than just as an end to itself, even if doing so makes it harder to accomplish any of the original goals behind the coin.

PS1 The full nodes are actually very well decentralized.

PS2 The physical hash power is skewed towards China, which is not ideal, but it tends to decentralize to US, Canada and to lesser extent other countries. It is improving.

However, the theoretical thought of a near infinite energy source inevitably pushing a PoRessource currencies system into finding (another) limitation again is outrageous. With all those free market edgelords in the cryptosphere, why don't they see the catastrophic flaw of dependency on scarcity? That's just insane. No matter the material/energetic efficiency technology will ever achieve, PoR will automatically counterbalance it.

It's full commitment into the long known failings of a free market economy. Giving up all control to the reward delay capacity of a toddler. A modern take on the easter island collapse on a holistic, global scale.

As time goes by, the number of people holding a token goes up, and competition among the staking services goes up, which results in more decentralization.

Take for instance on Tezos, with better internet we can eventually get RPi connected to Starlink which can be installed by the users themselves and start staking.

As hardware technology progresses, PoW goes in the opposite direction. Initially anyone can mine, but later only the most specialized optimized hardware will mine irrespective of the number of people holding the token.