⚡ BITCOIN MINING: THE CHALLENGE OF ENERGY COSTS AND THE FUTURE AFTER HALVING 2028 ⚡
Fred Thiel, CEO of Marathon Digital, issues a clear warning: profit margins in Bitcoin mining are shrinking due to rising energy costs and increasing competition in the sector.
Thiel emphasizes that mining is a zero-sum game, where as global capacity increases, so do the difficulties and pressure on margins, the lower limit of which is the cost of energy.
Only miners who have access to low-cost and reliable energy sources or who can diversify into adjacent areas, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC), will be able to survive this increasingly competitive scenario.
Thiel also warns of an even more drastic change in view of the next Bitcoin halving in 2028, when rewards per block will decrease to about 1.5 BTC.
Without a significant increase in transaction fees or the price of Bitcoin, many miners risk becoming unprofitable and therefore forced to cease operations. Despite Bitcoin's original design anticipating that fees would gradually replace rewards, this has not yet happened, and without sustained price growth, the economic calculations of mining will become very difficult.
Marathon Digital's strategy is clear: to remain among the miners with the lowest production costs, to better withstand the crisis, and to invest in its own energy infrastructure or collaborations with energy suppliers to ensure long-term sustainability.
In the future, according to Thiel, either miners will be owners or closely tied to energy producers, or they will be forced to cease operations, as the days of simply connecting to the power grid are destined to end.
