Bitcoin mining is no longer profitable

New data tells us that mining a single Bitcoin or one BTC costs the largest public mining companies over $82,000 USD, which is nearly double the figure it did the previous quarter. Estimates for smaller organisations say you need to spend about $137,000 to get that single BTC in return. BTC is currently only valued at $94,703 USD, which seems to be a problem in the math department.

Bitcoin mining will always be profitable for the people with the cheapest electricity and largest economies of scale. There is a difficulty adjustment algorithm in the protocol that ensures this. When the price tanks people turn off thier miners, difficulty adjusts downwards, and then it takes less electricity to find a block.

tl;dr title is wrong

this is what im always trying to get people to understand. bitcoin is programmed to take more resources to artificially increase in value. its why its so horrible for the environment and why it could never really be used as a currency. Now other coins fix this issue but bitcoin tends to be popular because its fixed. Some even do useful work like gridcoin.
- Libertarian economic theory failing in front of our very eyes
Yeah this article is woefully uninformed. Author seems to be butt hurt about GPU pricing rather than any serious interest in how the protocol actually works.
- The quote is actually from the article this one paraphrased and linked to, while leaving out all of the actual, you know, information
The headline isn't accurate as usual, but isn't completely wrong either. Anyway, the article you've quoted is more informative than the one I posted, so thanks for that quote.
We're at a point where it's no longer profitable for individual miners, even if we ignore externalities like the cost we're collectively paying due to pollution and carbon emissions.
Mining require increasing amount of energy and resources as time pass, so unless there's a radical change in bitcoin's algorithm or unless energy becomes free, we should expect mining to get non-profitable in more and more situations.
- We're at a point where it's no longer profitable for individual miners
  We have been at that point since GPU mining stopped being feasible in 2014, it's just gotten worse. ASICs made it so the only people who could profit off mining were people who could place a wholesale sized order of hardware from bitmain, etc. Anyone else who claimed to be mining profitably was likely someone who was:
  buying old hardware 2nd hand (or new hardware at MSRP) and capitalizing on free electricity in their rental
  not selling their Bitcoin immediately (they weren't making money from mining, they were making it from speculating)
  lived in Quebec and could double dip (North America's cheapest grid + free heating for 8 months of the year)
  unless there's a radical change in bitcoin's algorithm
  The algorithm already does this though. Every 2016 blocks if it took more than 10 minutes per block, the difficulty of mining bitcoin goes down, not up. This is why every halving event you see a radical drop in difficulty, because at a given kWh you are producing half as many bitcoin - meaning people turned off their miners because it's less profitable. The flipside is the rate of issuance goes down, so there is a lower inflationary effect, and the price of Bitcoin usually also skyrockets (which means eventually these miners re-enter, and difficulty eventually goes back to where it was). It can never get to a point where Bitcoin mining is completely unprofitable unless the price goes to zero, because there will always be a guy with a solar panel and fully paid-off hardware who can mine it for free. Granted, it can get to a point where a lot of people have to take a huge loss on capital expenditures if the price nosedives and never recovers
If we're at the point where it takes "economy of scale" to remain in the game then the average miner must have invested in a whole lot of hardware and such. What happens when the cost of financing the premises and equipment outweighs the meagre returns over electricity cost from keeping things running? There could be periods where nobody's making money. Not that I have any idea if we're in one.
I don't believe this is necessarily true. Miners like Riot Blockchain are operating at a loss and other people are stealing electricity.
- Miners like Riot Blockchain are operating at a loss
  I'm not a finance wizard, but I peeked at their last SEC filing, and first 3 quarters of 2024 they posted a 35m operating loss, but added almost 900m worth of assets to their balance sheet (mostly Bitcoin), which to me tells a very different story
There is nothing in the algorithm tied to BTC price. Sure, you'll likely tend to get less miners as the price decreases, but that doesn't guarantee that it's profitable. Plenty of people, organizations, governments, etc do things that aren't immediately profitable and may never be.

You mean getting paid for using energy is not a working business model? Was about time that the market found that out

Turns out the giant earth heater wasn’t the best business concept.
Getting paid for using energy is literally every business model.
Given the current price of bitcoin, I suspect the market still doesn't know.
Mostly due to the fact that mining bitcoin becomes harder as more and more are found, and the "worth" of that work no longer exceeds the cost in electricity to do so.
In the past, it was basically free money, especially with how volatile it's value is/was
- To this day, I have not understood what exactly is even being calculated, and for what real world application. I mean, I understand mostly what crypto is and how it works, but not why doing those calculations results in financial gain.

Thanks for the refresher. I'm aware of the basics, but assumed the difficulty measured by the number of zeros could only increase. Apparently difficulty can decrease, and I've read it's expected to decrease very soon to keep the system running a while longer.
Bitcoin's creator was smart enough to design a system that automatically adjust to remain profitable for several years without intervention, but not smart enough to foresee social and environmental costs.
It's a good example that illustrate why automated systems shouldn't be left running unsupervised, even if it's designed by the best minds with the best of intentions.
- It's a good example that illustrate why automated systems shouldn't be left running unsupervised, even if it's designed by the best minds with the best of intentions.
  The network is constantly supervised and mining is a competitive business. The network was built to adjust, and is working precisely as intended.
Wouldn't it be easier if a bunch of people paid a dollar every second, and one of those people was randomly selected to get every dollar submitted?
- it would, but the act of giving a dollar doesn't double as a way to validate transactions
Also a clue from one of the links is that "German industrial rate customers, cost is $200k/btc". Their industrial rate is $0.25/kwh, and so then their claim is based on 12c/kwh utility rates. Utility rates has pretty much always been cost prohibitive. Wholesales and behind the meter power is certainly an advantage large scale mining uses.

This is exactly as designed. Bitcoin mining is intended to becomes less profitable the more people do it, using market forces to control the amount of mining that's being done. Headlines like this are kind of ridiculous.

The headline is only ridiculous if you are inferring something else that isn't in the headline. Otherwise it's just... true?
- I generally expect a headline to be about something notable. "Sky remains blue", "Boiling water said to be hot", and so forth are ridiculous headlines IMO.

It remains profitable for scammers who use malware botnets consisting of other peoples computing power and electricity.

bitcoin mining hasn't been profitable for a long time. Like, a decade or so.

...but you could buy specialized hardware for it
- True, but the outlay of cost for the hardware was higher than the value of Bitcoin you would receive.

Not if you outright steal the electricity.

I remember a thread where someone had put a mining rig inside a hotel or apartment's cleaning room and was running it off the stolen electricity.

Finally.

It's actually been that way for years outside of places with subsidized/corrupt pricing.

Good.

Now the prices of GPUs will go back to normal right?... right?

Bitcoin mining hasn't had anything to do with GPUs since 2014. Ether, since 2022. It's the AI people you're looking for.
I don't think GPU are used for bitcoin any more? You need ASICs to be able to hope for any return on investment.
- Malware that feature crypto mining is probably still using GPUs, since the person getting the coins is not paying the utility bill.
Hey, sorry to break it to you, but there's this thing called "AI"...
In the future, games will renders about nine pixels and it will all be upscaling.
- Atari games are going to make a huge comeback