After brushing against record highs earlier in 2025, Bitcoin is ending the year on a distinctly humbler note.
Prices have fallen well below their peak, unsettling investors who had once touted the cryptocurrency as a reliable hedge or a one-way bet on digital scarcity. For miners (the industrial backbone of the Bitcoin ecosystem) the retreat has been more than psychological. It has reopened an awkward question: does it still make economic sense to dig for digital gold?
A new report by BestBrokers offers an unflattering answer. Using data from the Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index, the firm has mapped the energy demands and costs of Bitcoin mining across the world in December 2025. The results underscore how brutally energy-intensive the business remains, even as technological efficiencies improve.
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Bitcoin’s protocol adjusts its mining difficulty to ensure that a new block is added roughly every ten minutes. That mechanical regularity yields 144 blocks a day, and with the current block reward set at 3.125 bitcoins, around 450 new coins enter circulation daily. Where those coins are minted, however, matters enormously.
The United States now dominates the mining landscape
According to BestBrokers’ estimates, American miners produce about 171 bitcoins a day, nearly 38% of the global total. That output consumes roughly 158 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of electricity each day, or more than 57,000 GWh annually. Put differently, Bitcoin mining alone accounts for over 1.3% of America’s total yearly electricity demand. At average commercial electricity rates, powering these operations costs around $22m per day.
The arithmetic is unforgiving. At current prices, mining a single bitcoin in the United States requires nearly $130,000 worth of electricity, comfortably above the market value of the coin itself. It is, for most operators, cheaper to buy Bitcoin than to mine it.
America is not alone in this energy-hungry pursuit. China, Kazakhstan and Canada round out the top four mining nations, followed by Russia, Germany and a cluster of smaller but power-dense hubs such as Ireland and Singapore.
Globally, Bitcoin mining now consumes about 417 GWh of electricity every day, translating into more than 152,000 GWh per year, more than the annual electricity usage of countries like Sweden, Norway or the Netherlands.
To be sure, the network has become more efficient in some respects. The global mining hashrate rose by roughly 32% over the past year, while transaction fees collapsed: the average fee fell from $5.18 in December 2024 to just $0.66 a year later. Energy use per transaction also declined sharply, from 32.44 kilowatt-hours to 4.41. Yet these gains have been overwhelmed by scale. More machines, running harder, still mean more power consumed in aggregate.
The timing could hardly be worse for Bitcoin miners
Bitcoin’s price slid by around 30% in November, a drop initially dismissed as a routine correction. But prices have yet to recover to their earlier averages. As revenues shrank and electricity bills stayed stubbornly high, miners’ margins were squeezed.
The consequence is a brutal sorting of the industry. Mining remains viable chiefly for firms with access to ultra-cheap electricity, state-of-the-art hardware and ample capital buffers. For everyone else, profitability has become hostage to energy prices rather than to Bitcoin’s ideological promise. The decentralised future, it seems, still runs on very old-fashioned economics.
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