Since Bitcoin's inception in 2009, the amount of energy required to mine has always been less than the amount of Bitcoin you got for mining. But that was never going to last; there was a limit of 21 million possible Bitcoins baked into the system from the jump, and the rate of new coins mined has gotten slimmer as competition has increased, making the economics worse and worse over time.

These days, one Bitcoin trades for around $94,000, but costs about $137,000 in electricity for small-scale operations to mine, making new coins an economic liability for all but the largest players. For those whales, Gizmodo estimates the most optimal cost for mining a bitcoin at around $82,000 — slim margins which are shrinking fast.

Right now, the top 8 percent of crypto wallets own a little under 99 percent of all Bitcoin in circulation. Zooming in even farther, we see that the top 1 percent of crypto wallets control over 90 percent — so much for all that decentralization that Bitcoin was supposed to represent.