Mining in France: Mining at home costs more than it brings in

70 3000 series graphics cards, piled up in a garage, mining ether. On September 15, 2022, I unplugged everything: Ethereum went to proof of stake, my rig no longer had anything to secure. I sold it batch by batch, over two years. First the silence. Then winter, without the free heating of the GPUs. Four years later, mining in France has almost disappeared from homes and yet French shops have never sold so many machines.

That day, around 1 PH/s of GPU computing power found itself without a blockchain to secure. Four years later, domestic mining has not completely disappeared in France. But its nature has changed: what was still a large-scale speculative activity has become a niche practice.

What mining brought in in France between 2020 and 2022

At the time, ether was mined on the Ethash algorithm, accessible to any consumer card. An RTX 3080 was running around 100 MH/s for around 230 W and was bringing in several dollars per day at peak 2021, with ether above $4,000 and network fees inflating the block reward.

The French kilowatt hour was then between 0.15 and 0.17 € incl. VAT. Even at this price, electricity represented 10 to 20% of income: the margin absorbed everything, including a graphics card paid double its retail price. This point is often forgotten, in France, we were already mining with expensive electricity, and the model was only supported by the price of ether.

This period left concrete traces: shortage of cards, restricted “LHR” versions from Nvidia, garage rigs, communities of miners, French shops and first hosts. Many of these actors are still here. Their job has changed.

The Merge, then the collapse

On September 15, 2022, Ethereum abandoned Proof-of-Work. For GPU miners, it was an earthquake: the biggest source of income in the sector disappeared in a few hours. The report on other mineable chains: Ethereum Classic, Ravencoin, Ergo, Flux; caused their difficulties to explode and card revenues to collapse. The second-hand market collapsed, rigs were sold off, GPU hosts closed or pivoted.

Kaspa offered the GPU a reprieve in 2023, before dedicated ASICs (IceRiver, Bitmain KS series) close the door. CPU mining has remained a niche. Monero has become the main representative, thanks to RandomX, an algorithm designed to favor CPUs and resist ASICs. Other projects have attempted to maintain mining accessible to processors, but few have succeeded in maintaining a community of miners, comparable liquidity and capitalization over time.

In 2026, mining in France is structurally in deficit

The calculation is simple to do. An Antminer S21 Pro, today’s reference machine, displays 234 TH/s for 3,510 W, or approximately 84 kWh per day of consumption.

At the regulated sales rate, the kWh in the Base option is currently billed at €0.2001 including tax for a 3 to 6 kVA meter (CRE grid of August 1, 2026). Electricity from a single machine therefore costs €16.86 per day at home.

Opposite, with a hashprice of $39.63 per PH/s per day as of September 6, 2026, the same machine produces around $9 per day, or a little more than €8. Result: a loss of around €8 to €9 per day and per machine, even before counting wear and tear and the subscription.

In other words, the French domestic tariff condemns Bitcoin mining at home. This is not a market opinion, it is a subtraction.

French players sell here and branch elsewhere

Hence the model that replaced domestic mining: sell the machine in France, operate it abroad. The public offers of French boutiques say this openly.

• Happy Mining: hosting in the United States announced around $0.07/kWh.
• Blobb (Florent Gabriel): machines hosted and connected in the United States, Iceland, Kazakhstan, Finland.
• La Mine Française: announces 14 data centers in 8 countries (Norway, Ethiopia, Paraguay, Dubai, etc.) and highlights €0.0507/kWh compared to €0.20 in France.

The logic is arithmetic: at €0.05/kWh excluding tax, the same machine which loses money in France becomes profitable again. The know-how, sales and after-sales service remain French; the computing power is expatriated.

The risk that “turnkey” hosting goes unmentioned

This model, however, has a blind spot: the French owner remains dependent on an infrastructure that he does not physically control.

The testimonies available online show that the risk is not theoretical: machines immobilized for several months following a dispute between the host and the data center. There are also electrical or technical incidents, periods of downtime during which the machine continues to lose value without producing income.

To this may be added less visible costs: restarting after a period of downtime, transporting the machine to another site or returning to France, to which may be added, depending on the country of origin, customs formalities.

The owner owns the machine, but does not own the electrical outlet, the data center, or the network infrastructure that makes it work. This is the ambiguity of the model: hosting transforms an unprofitable French electricity expense into a remote industrial service. But it also transforms a problem that the miner could previously resolve himself: breakdown, restart, moving the machine, into a contractual issue with a third party.

What remains of mining in France

Four uses survive on French soil, but none are profitable industrial mining.

THE heating-mining first: this is the only case where the French kilowatt hour is not a pure cost, since the heat of the machine replaces that of a radiator. An S21 Pro running for 24 hours converts around 84 kWh of electricity into heat. In an electrically heated house, this heat is no longer just an externality of mining: it can replace part of the heating consumption. The company La Mine Française offers this ASIC rental method.

THE solo hobby then, with devices like the Bitaxe or the NerdQaxe, sold in particular by French stores. At around fifteen watts, it’s a lottery ticket, not a mining activity.

L’industrialfinally: there is, to my knowledge, no French industrial mining sector comparable to the large North American, Scandinavian or Ethiopian installations. In France, according to Cambridge CBECIBitcoin’s estimated global hashrate share in 2022 was 0.21%.

A law to undermine EDF, still pending

The subject has political relevance. On July 11, 2025, the deputy Aurélien Lopez-Liguori (RN, Hérault) filed the bill no. 1750co-signed by 76 other RN and UDR elected officials, to authorize on an experimental basis, over five years, the use of surplus electricity for mining cryptoassets, equipment installed on former industrial sites or near EDF power stations.

The text is based on an estimate from Adan: dedicating one gigawatt to mining would represent 100 to 150 million dollars in annual revenue. It was sent back to the Finance Committee, after a first amendment rejected in June 2025. The text was not adopted and remains, at this stage, a parliamentary proposal.

MiCA has sorted out the historic shops, but not in the way you think

The regulatory shift in summer 2026 has reshuffled the cards. The transitional period of the French PSAN regime ended on July 1, 2026; all providers without MiCA approval on this date were automatically deregistered on July 2, 2026.

Two historic mining shops have overcome the obstacle, and not the other way around. Meria (formerly Just Mining), founded in Moselle, obtained PSCA approval no. A2026-020 on June 22, 2026. Feel Mining, via its parent company Blockchain Process Security, is also on the AMF white list after approval obtained in July 2026. Their current activity goes well beyond mining equipment alone: ​​they now operate as service providers on regulated digital assets.

The global context leaves no margin

Even outside France, the equation is tightening. The difficulty of the Bitcoin network is at 127.45 T as of September 6, 2026, down around 13% over the year but still close to its record of October 2025 (~156 T). The global hashrate is close to 1 ZH/s (~934 EH/s). BTC is moving around 79,000 $after the halving of 2024 which split the block reward.

Above all, artificial intelligence captures the energy and the sites that were used for mining. Dated example: On September 1, 2026, listed miner Hyperscale Data turned off all of its Bitcoin machines at its Michigan site to release 20 MW for the benefit of an AI cloud client. The case illustrates a broader trend: infrastructure capable of providing lots of electricity and computing power is itself becoming a sought-after asset for AI players.

What the French reader doesn’t know: taxation

One last point, specifically French. Mining is not fiscally treated as a simple capital gain on cryptocurrencies: income from mining activity falls under non-commercial profits (BNC). Most readers who start out don’t know this.

There remains, however, one exception: spec mining. Some French miners continue to take the risk of mining new projects before the arrival of ASICs or massive competition. The window may be profitable a few weeks or worth nothing at all a few months later. In this market, the scarce resource is no longer electricity. It’s information.

This article is an editorial analysis and does not constitute investment advice. Mining cryptoassets involves risks, including loss of capital and dependence on the price of bitcoin and the cost of electricity.