I'm right there with you with the idea of miners being the guys getting the network alive. Problem is, this is big money. Big mining plants is not helping the network completely, but rather being a potential risk for the network. While many newer cryptocurrencies with PoW have a low re-target difficulty, others might be stopped or halted for very long if a big "miner" goes offline. While this has not really been the case for bigger currencies yet, you see it all the time with small ones. They die because a "big miner" leaves the network.
I like the whole community miner aspect but, imagine what would happen even for a short while if one of the big Chinese miner facilities went offline.. hours, days or weeks before the blockchain would be re-targeted. Kinda makes me wonder. As I see it, the more smaller guys mining or helping the network the better. Great setup, thanks for sharing!
Very excellent points and I agree. As this space and ecosystem develop I think these issues will begin to be addressed and solved as governance, smart/asic resistant algorithms, and emergence of different/ hybrid consensus models evolve.
I tend to agree, ASIC resistant algorithms is one way, but I don't think "we" yet have found the ideal solution yet. New coins comes along all the time with the answer to this problem, who knows, the ideal solution might already be out there :)