Bitcoin mining now just totes unprofitable, costing over $137,000 to mine just one BTC in the US and near $200,000 per coin in Germany

A hand holds a bitcoin over the US flag draped over a slate board. — (Image credit: Boris Zhitkov / SimpleImages)

As I wipe the dust from my coffin I arise to tell you all that I was there when they first started mining the cryptocurrencies from the bowls of the digital frontier. I was there early enough to look at my old rig and wonder if it was worth setting up to see if it could score a few coins over the course of a month or so. I've known a few people who did things like acccidentally throw away drives full of BTC. I even knew people who got in early and cashed out fast, otherwise known as 'bastards'.

Since its early days, crypto has been, to put it politely, an absolute shitshow of cryptoglogical proportions. Even when it was somewhat viable to put your rig to work it'd still be a long haul of wait and see before you might eventually unearth yourself a coin here and there. And of course your old GPU has been worked into dust and your power bill has skyrocketed for the trouble.

Once you've got these incredibly efficient, and hopefully relatively power friendly setups in place, you've not only dropped your potential mining overheads but you likely have a computation setup that could complete other tasks. This makes it an attractive option for larger companies who may look to lease their mining operations for other computations when they're unable to make money from mining. Then they can swap back if and when the market picks up once again.

For now the big takeaway is that mining crypto isn't going to be viable for individuals, possibly ever again. With huge centres being setup in key positions you just won't be able to beat out the larger companies acting here. Any new coin that comes up they can point their rigs to it and begin the process all over again. It's almost like you're better off using your sweet rigs for gaming, not crypto mining, just like the good lord intended.

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Hope’s been writing about games for about a decade, starting out way back when on the Australian Nintendo fan site Vooks.net. Since then, she’s talked far too much about games and tech for publications such as Techlife, Byteside, IGN, and GameSpot. Of course there’s also here at PC Gamer, where she gets to indulge her inner hardware nerd with news and reviews. You can usually find Hope fawning over some art, tech, or likely a wonderful combination of them both and where relevant she’ll share them with you here. When she’s not writing about the amazing creations of others, she’s working on what she hopes will one day be her own. You can find her fictional chill out ambient far future sci-fi radio show/album/listening experience podcast right here.

No, she’s not kidding.

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