&gt; All that mining does is give the person with the most hashrate more voting power in which transactions will be accepted. Innovation in mining hardware and data centers does not in any way increase bitcoin&#x27;s security.<p>This is completely wrong.  The higher the difficulty, the harder it becomes to attack the network, which is a critical feature.  If anyone who rented a data center could attack Bitcoin at this point, it would be even less stable (much less!) than it has been already.