717 sats \ 0 replies \ @nel0 7 Apr freebie \ on: Is it still profitable to mine Bitcoin? bitcoin
By referring to GPUs you're definitely not mining bitcoin, since for over a decade now that ASICs have been available and dominating bitcoin mining.
In any case, regarding mining, profitability is not a unidimensional thing, it depends heavily on 2 big factors which are the price of electricity and the efficiency of the mining gear you're using. It also depends on the investment cost and time to pay it off, however that's a lot harder to reason about.
Systems like bitcoin are almost always profitable for someone to mine, but unlikely that they're profitable to everyone unless there's a quick run up of price because deployment of new hashrate is constrained by the real world, while price can theoretically shoot up arbitrarily fast.
The mining difficulty adjusts with the observed hash rate, which means that if new hashing power comes online because it's currently possible to be profitable, the difficulty will go up, pricing out people who have either higher energy cost of lower efficiency devices. The opposite is also true, if the profitability is too low, many miners will be disconnected which in turn will make the difficulty go down and the profitability higher, bringing back new miners.
This means that the system tends to equilibrium and is by design always profitable for the marginal miner who can get access to the best gear and cheaper energy, aside from quick price swings which might make everyone or no one profitable for a while.