CoinShares analysts confirm: the cost of mining reaches $137,000 for small players, and the price of BTC does not compensate for 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, mining one coin costs public mining companies $82,000—almost double that of the previous quarter. For small organizations, this figure reaches $137,000, while the current market value of BTC is $94,703. Such a discrepancy calls into question 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 does not disappear completely. Large companies are betting on technological superiority: they upgrade farms, reducing energy consumption and increasing computational speed. Furthermore, 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, capacities can quickly be 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 for quick switching to new algorithms or cryptocurrencies, blocking competition from small players. Meanwhile, the community recalls 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 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 highly 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 humorously noted in the community, 'the best use of graphics cards is still gaming, not the pursuit of digital gold.'