Mining is harder than ever. At what point do small miners just give up?

According to Cointelegraph, Bitcoin mining difficulty just jumped to 134.7 trillion, beating the previous all-time high from August.

Meanwhile, the hashrate actually dropped from over 1 EH/s to around 967 EH/s. So, difficulty up, but hashrate down, which means one thing: smaller miners are getting squeezed.

Some real questions here:

• Are we heading toward a mining landscape where only mega operations survive?
• Or is this just part of Bitcoin’s natural security scaling as more capital flows in?
• At what point does this start becoming a centralization risk?

The halving already cut block rewards in half. Now with difficulty this high, margins are brutal unless you're plugged into dirt-cheap energy.

Is this bullish for long-term security, or are we slowly pricing out everyone but the big guys?

Would love to hear thoughts from anyone actually mining right now too.