Why Bitcoin mining is no longer profitable?

Far be it from me to engage in a little schadenfreude… Actually, no. I really enjoy telling you about this one, as someone who needed a new graphics card at the tail end of the pandemic. Reports indicate that mining for Bitcoins (i.e., trying to turn electricity and math into money) is no longer profitable. Cry me a freakin’ river.

This is a complicated story, but the basic equation is that it now costs more in electricity to “mine” a single Bitcoin than that Bitcoin is currently worth—by a significant margin. Due to the nature of the Bitcoin protocol, which started the better part of two decades ago, it was inevitable that we’d reach this point eventually. The pool of minable Bitcoins shrinks as more are mined, and as that happens, the cryptographic work needed to “find” new ones becomes increasingly harder.