Once upon a time, Bitcoin was touted as the people’s money, a libertarian dream unshackled by governments or banking consortiums. A decentralized utopia of peer-to-peer transactions and digital sovereignty. Today, a harsh truth is settling in: the financial gains realized by mining Bitcoin are outweighed by its energy costs.

The math used to be simple. Let your graphics card crunch some numbers and voilà, free money. The energy costs were manageable, and the Bitcoin you got in exchange for a slightly higher power bill that month would eventually negate it, so who cares? But Bitcoin had a cap. 21 million coins. With each one mined, the reward got smaller and the math harder.

In 2025, it now costs more to mine a single Bitcoin than you get from selling it, according to a report published by CoinShares, a cryptocurrency investment firm. For your average crypto-bro with a garage rig and dreams of Lambos, it now costs about $137,000 in electricity to mine a Bitcoin worth $94,000.

Even for the big dogs with entire warehouse setups and enough fans to cool it all, the best-case scenario is a mining cost of $82,000. That’s a razor-thin margin that probably isn’t worth the investment anymore.

And who’s still profiting from this madness? The whales. The top 8 percent of wallets now control around 99 percent of all Bitcoin. The dream of decentralization just wound up centralizing a ton of monopoly money wealth into the hands of the people who were already vastly wealthy.

Bitcoin isn’t the freedom-fueled monetary revolution it promised to be. It’s a speculative pyramid that lets dull rich dudes cosplay as cyberpunk edgelords, all while making them enormous piles of cash that they can toss onto their already tall piles of cash. Meanwhile, the average bitcoin investor is sitting there wondering if they’re ever going to see a return after investing their life savings into fake money.