[mrb]

"Mining already is so expensive that it takes company-sized investments to participate"

This is not true at all. I do not understand why journalists repeat this claim. It is like saying "investing in the stock market is so expensive that it takes company-sized investments to participate". It is not true. Whether you invest $1000 or $1 million your returns—as a percentage of your initial investment—will be the same regardless if this is the stock market or Bitcoin mining.

In fact I would say the opposite is true: small miners have a slightly better profitability than large-scale miners, because they are so small they do not even have to cover certain costs. A large-scale miner will have to pay for hosting or for building a data center but a small miner will host the hardware in his house at no extra cost. A large-scale miner will have to hire staff to maintain the miners but a small miner will maintain his machine himself.

Of course profitability depends a lot on electricity costs, but again you might be a small miner and live (for example) in Douglas County, Washington and pay a domestic electricity rate of 2.5 cents per kWh, and you will beat many large-scale miners who almost always pay more (see my previous comment on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10907584).

Large-scale miners may get a financial advantage by buying hardware in bulk, or manufacturing it themselves, but this is a cost saving of at most 20 or 30%, and this certainly does not make mining so expensive that small miners cannot participate.

[nharada]

I was under the impression that specialized ASIC based miners have made even GPU mining relatively pointless.

[mhluongo]

Not really relevant- small miners can buy ASICs too.