CoinShares analysts confirm: the cost of mining reaches $137,000 for small players, while the price of BTC does not cover expenses. Years after the cryptocurrency boom, Bitcoin (BTC) mining has ceased to be accessible even for large players. According to a study by CoinShares published through Overclockers in May 2025, the mining cost for a single coin for public mining companies is $82,000 — almost double the previous quarter. For small organizations, this figure reaches $137,000, while the current market value of BTC is $94,703. Such a discrepancy raises questions about the economic feasibility of the process. Geography plays a key role: in Germany, for example, the mining cost skyrockets to $200,000 per BTC due to high electricity tariffs. 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 does not disappear completely. Large companies bet on technological superiority: they upgrade farms, reducing energy consumption and increasing computational speed. Moreover, the flexibility of infrastructure allows repurposing capacities 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 capacities can quickly return to mining. For private enthusiasts, the era of home setups has apparently definitively passed into history. Modern industrial centers, located in regions with cheap electricity (such as Scandinavia or Central Asia), dominate the industry. Their scale allows for rapid switching to new algorithms or cryptocurrencies, blocking competition from small players. Meanwhile, the community reminisces about the early days of Bitcoin — the era of the 'digital gold rush' when miners accidentally discarded hard drives with hundreds of coins or earned fortunes in mere months. Today, such stories sound like legends. Modern realities require multi-million dollar investments, and profitability remains questionable even for industrial giants. It seems that BTC mining has turned into a specialized industry with high barriers to entry. Its future now depends not so much on the price of the cryptocurrency itself but on breakthroughs in energy-efficient technologies and the ability of companies to adapt to market volatility. For ordinary users, as the community ironically notes, 'the best use of graphics cards is still gaming, not the pursuit of digital gold.'