Comment by lbreakjai

> Historically, Bitcoin can be and has been mined on consumer hardware. Whether this is profitable will depend on several factors, but it's one of the reasons that consumer grade graphics cards have increased in price lately. I'm unaware of any major economies of scale here.

Mining bitcoin with consumer grade GPUs hasn't been viable for a very long time. Any serious miner will be using ASICs. The reason why GPU prices exploded is the double hit of COVID supply chain disruption followed by the emergence of LLMs.