 One of the issues with proof of work incentivizing the pursuit of higher hashrates is in how the network calculates block reward coinbase payouts and rewards miners based on the work that they have submitted. If a coin generated, say a block a minute, and this is a constant, then what happens if more miners jump on a network and do more work? The network cannot pay out more than 0 block reward per 0 minute, and so a difficulty mechanism is used to maintain balance. The difficulty will scale up and down in response to the overall nethash, so if many miners join the network, or extremely high hashing devices such as ASICs or FPGAs jump on, the network will respond accordingly, using the difficulty mechanism to make the problems harder, effectively giving an edge to hardware that can solve them faster, balancing the network. This not only maintains the block a minute reward but it has the added side-effect of energy requirements that scale up with network adoption. Imagine, for example, if one miner gets on a network all alone with a CPU doing 00 MH/s and is getting all 000 coins that can possibly be paid out in a day. Then, if another miner jumps on the network with the same CPU, each miner would receive 00 coins in a day instead of 000 since they are splitting the required work evenly, despite the fact that the net electrical output has doubled along with the work. Electricity costs miner's money and is a factor in driving up coin price along with adoption, and since more people are now mining, the coin is less centralized. Now let's say a large corporation has found it profitable to manufacture an ASIC for this coin, knowing they will make their money back mining it or selling the units to professionals. They join the network doing 000 MH/s and will be pulling in 00 coins a day, while the two guys with their CPUs each get 0 now. Those two guys aren't very happy, but the corporation is. Not only does this negatively affect the miners, it compromises the security of the entire network by centralizing the coin supply and hashrate, opening the doors to double spends and 00% attacks from potential malicious actors. Uncertainty of motives and questionable validity in a distributed ledger do not mix. When technology advances in a field, it is usually applauded and welcomed with open arms, but in the world of crypto things can work quite differently. One of the glaring flaws in the current model and the advent of specialized hardware is that it's never ending. Suppose the two men from the rather extreme example above took out a loan to get themselves that ASIC they heard about that can get them 00 coins a day? When they join the other ASIC on the network, the difficulty adjusts to keep daily payouts consistent at 000, and they will each receive only 00 coins instead of 00 since the reward is now being split three ways. Now what happens if a better ASIC is released by that corporation? Hopefully, those two guys were able to pay off their loans and sell their old ASICs before they became obsolete. This system, as it stands now, only perpetuates a never ending hashrate arms race in which the weapons of choice are usually a combination of efficiency, economics, profitability and in some cases control. 