Years after the cryptocurrency boom, Bitcoin (BTC) mining has ceased to be accessible even for larger players. According to a study by CoinShares, published through Overclockers in May 2025, mining one coin costs public mining companies $82,000 — almost double the previous quarter. For smaller organizations, this figure reaches $137,000, while the current market value of BTC is $94,703. Such a discrepancy raises questions about the economic viability of the process.
Geography plays a key role: in Germany, for example, the cost of mining skyrockets to $200,000 per BTC due to high electricity rates. This makes the country one of the least profitable regions for mining. Even optimizing equipment and switching to renewable energy sources do not save from losses under such conditions.
However, mining is not disappearing completely. Large companies are betting on technological superiority: they are upgrading farms, reducing energy consumption, and increasing computation speed. Additionally, the flexibility of the infrastructure allows for repurposing capacity for cloud computing or artificial intelligence tasks during periods of low BTC profitability. This is a risk-hedging strategy — when the cryptocurrency market recovers, the capacity can be quickly returned to mining.
For private enthusiasts, the era of home setups seems to have definitively passed. Modern industrial centers, located in regions with cheap electricity (such as Scandinavia or Central Asia), dominate the industry. Their scale allows them to quickly switch to new algorithms or cryptocurrencies, blocking the possibility of competition from smaller players.
Meanwhile, the community recalls the early days of Bitcoin — the era of the 'digital gold rush,' when miners accidentally threw away hard drives with hundreds of coins or earned fortunes in a matter of months. Today, such stories sound like legends. Modern realities require multimillion-dollar investments, and profitability remains in question even for industrial giants.
It seems that BTC mining has turned into a specialized industry with high barriers to entry. Its future now depends less on the price of the cryptocurrency itself and more on breakthroughs in energy-efficient technologies and the ability of companies to adapt to market volatility. For average users, as ironically noted in the community, 'the best use of graphics cards is still gaming, not the pursuit of digital gold.'
