If you take the last 28 days, it's been setting new records for months.
I agree and believe that to prevent action by an efficient government-minded, bitcoin-proof mining algorithm can be re-engineered to conserve electricity. One naïve notion that I have is that a limited number of digital medals can be sold by consensus miners who entitle the carriers to mined bitcoins. Or jurisdiction may prohibit or restrict mining, for example if there is no mining wherever electricity is subsidized by the government and the mine is just outside peak hours.
If payments to participating miners are sent from a reputed pool address, then blockchain analysis should be able to find out what proportion of gift blocks are spent very quickly. Especially when the hashing power race matures, the more Bitcoin is worth, the more likely people want to hold it.
