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Institutional mining definitely has to retract, it's so bubbly and centralized it boggles the mind.
Much of the institutional mining was an arb on stranded energy, which AI has squeezed, shrinking datacenter footprints for regular servers, which AI has also squeezed... treasury co proxies which have commoditized, and "provenance" premium for newly minted coins (no chainanal history that can be used to sue an institution later)... and with each block there are less provenancial coins to re-sell... which mean less potential ROI on capex.
Collapsing fee rates are another reason for miners to throw in the towel.
Depreciation on chips cuts into any margin left.
Mining must inevitably be done altruistically or for the waste heat. I see the future as an ASIC powered spaceheater/AC or water heater in every home, barring some institutional adoption that brings fee rates sustainably higher. This would be ideal for decentralization.
So forgive me @justin_shocknet indulge my simplicity for a second
If the above is the case and we go through multiple halvings sideways, would that infer that miners like antpool may give up and move their power elsewhere
And could that by default decentralized the mining pool by removing some of the big miners
Ergo lowering hashrate and easing difficulty adjustment allowing smaller miners to compete?