Suppose I could harness the power of 1,000 or even 10,000 private computers distributed over the internet and all contributing resources. Could I profitably mine bitcoin?(This is not a theoretical question, I actually do have a way to do this) .
In the past: Yup. That is why many server admins for the big clusters learned what bitcoin was. Either to do that themselves or to yell at the people who were trying to.
But this is (arguably) a problem as certain geopolitical regions have a LOT of miners and resources which give them a significant advantage with respect to mining new coins. Think of it as increased probability rather than a guaranteed return. But, more importantly, it arguably gives them too much control over the system. Do some research on the subject, but I am sure that if I gave you two guesses you would get it.
In the beginning, people used general-purpose CPUs for this, but it's the sort of embarrassingly parallel problem that GPUs are great at, so GPU mining rapidly outstripped anything that a CPU could do. These days, even GPUs are outclassed by ASICs designed specifically for mining. The amount of bitcoin you'd get by mining with a CPU would be minute and, worse still, would actually be a net negative, once you factor in the power bill to keep that CPU running. The ASICs are just too power-efficient for anything else to compete.
No such thing. If it relies on a Proof of Work hash, it can be put into a chip, and specialist hardware for a simple function will always be more efficient (hashes per watt) than general hardware. The main barrier is not capability, but bothering to.
Proof of Stake would be different, but all examples are presently experimental.
That's not the only relevant measure, since specialist hardware must be designed and produced.
For a memory-latency bound PoW requiring hundreds of MB, it's far from certain that custom designed RAM can compete with commodity RAM.
For instance, SRAM is one order of magnitude faster than DRAM, but two orders of magnitude more expensive, making it much less suitable for mining.
There is such a thing as ASIC-resistant cryptocurrencies as evidenced by the fact that there are many cryptos in existence today that have been around for longer a year and have no ASIC mining yet. OP can mine on this today and not have to compete against ASICs.
Explain please?