It&#x27;s a race to the bottom. It will end with the party that manages to <i>just</i> win that race by making the smallest profit possible at the highest efficiency of Joules per hash computed. Bitcoin is interesting for many reasons, the real-world effects of a couple of configuration settings and some cleverly picked auto-scaling parameters are immense. The number of orders of magnitude that the protocol has survived with minor tweaks to date is very impressive.