Thanks for the reply and yes I do realise you can be in a pool but is seems its not very profitable unless you are using virtually free power. For a dedicated mining company the costs to mine at least one $1M Bitcoin every 10 minutes it would surely mean the cost to get that coin must also be approaching $1M. Presently it takes ~150,000 kWh to produce one bitcoin on average so as the value of the bitcoin increases the cost to produce it must also increase.
People assume power cost and production is linear and uniform when it is not. We have to remove this assumption first, it is incredible but also true I think that power can be free at times in some parts of the world. We havent cracked the problem of
nuclear fusion just yet to achieve easy free power but phenomena such as
geothermal power localised in some areas and other hard to transmit spikes in energy mean power can be far cheaper then simply burning gasoline.
Energy is literally thrown away in some parts of the world, main reason this occurs is natural inefficiency. Sometimes a business can thrive purely through increasing efficiency in some way that benefits society, its the basis of capitalism imo. Transmitting power over great distances causes losses from resistance and cost to build that infrastructure, BTC can be a means to capture cheap energy use and propagate it usefully. Its not quite the simple argument you might have been sold, alot of things are not simply absolute yes or no as we hear in the news unfortunately.