In Q4, RIOT spent $29.1M in "cost of revenues for mining" and mined 1,355 coins. Divide one by the other, than they spent $21,476 to mine each coin in Q4.
In Q4, the average difficulty was roughly 21.92T. In about 16 hours, it will have risen to approximately 29.48T, an increase of 34.5% over Q4's average. This 35% increase brings RIOT's cost to mine each BTC to approximately $28,875.
The current price of BTC is about $38,275. This means that the return on each coin mined going forward is approximately $9,400.
In March, RIOT had 42,919 miners running which mined 511 BTC. Each miner mined 0.012 BTC in March. Thus, each miner had an operating profit of 0.012 BTC x $9,400 = $112.80 in March.
In December, RIOT spent $301 million to order 27,000 more miners. Each miner cost $11,148.
At $112.80 operating profit per month, new miners deployed today will take 8 years, 3 months to achieve a positive return on the $11,148 initial investment ("ROI").
The next BTC halving will occur in March 2024, in 1 year, 10 months. At that point, the cost to mine one BTC will double. Even at today's difficulty, RIOT's machines will cost more to operate ($57,750 per BTC) than BTC is worth by that point. I suspect they'll reach that point even sooner since difficulty is still rising, but they definitely will cease to be profitable to operate by that point.
These numbers are certainly not going to be exactly correct, but small differences don't change the conclusion - these miners will never turn a profit.
The only exception I see to this would be a large increase in the price of BTC. In this scenario it would still be a better investment just to buy BTC and realize that gain directly than to overpay for RIOT.
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