Veteran investor slams Bitcoin mining as rewards drop

Veteran investor slams Bitcoin mining as rewards drop originally appeared on TheStreet.

Veteran investor Fred Krueger recently slammed Bitcoin mining, as the reward has declined 8 times and the difficulty has risen 1 million times.

Bitcoin mining is the process of using high-end computers to solve cryptographic problems known as hashes, validate Bitcoin transactions, and add them to the blockchain network in return for newly created bitcoins as a reward.

Hash rate is a metric that measures how fast a miner executes cryptographic functions to solve blocks in a chain. It is calculated in terms of hashes per second, i.e., the number of hash operations executed per second.

Bitcoin hash rate has grown 94,000 times in the last 12 years, and the reward has declined 8 times in value, Krueger decried.

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However, data from CoinWarzsuggests that the Bitcoin hash rate has grown at an even higher rate. In August 2013, the hash rate stood at 427.5 TH/s and has grown to 842.31 EH/s in August 2025.

Source: CoinWarz It means the Bitcoin hash rate has grown approximately 1.97 million times over the last 12 years.

The Bitcoin mining reward has also fallen from 50 BTC per block in 2009 to 3.125 BTC per block in 2025. It means the current reward is 6.25% of the earlier reward.

“What a terrible business,” said Krueger. His concern is valid, as Bitcoin mining is no longer as lucrative a venture as it once was. The uncertainty around tariffs on mining-related hardware has also made the mining community concerned.

As per Kraken, Bitcoin was trading at $119,788.80 at press time.

Veteran investor slams Bitcoin mining as rewards drop first appeared on TheStreet on Aug 12, 2025

This story was originally reported by TheStreet on Aug 12, 2025, where it first appeared.

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