The tide has turned against bitcoin miners and the war is getting worse every week.
Checkonchain’s difficulty regression model, which estimates average production costs based on network difficulty and energy input, pegged the figure at $88,000 per bitcoin per March 13.
Bitcoin is trading at $69,200 as of Sunday morning, creating a gap of nearly $19,000 per coin and means that the average miner operates at a loss of 21% on each block produced.
Cost pressure has been building since October’s crash took bitcoin from $126,000 to below $70,000, but the Iran war accelerated it. Oil above $100 feeds directly into electricity costs for mining, particularly the estimated 8-10% of the global hash rate operating in energy markets sensitive to supplies from the Middle East.
The Strait of Hormuz, which handles about 20% of the world’s oil and gas flows, remains effectively closed to most commercial traffic. And Trump’s 48-hour ultimatum on Saturday, in which he threatened to attack Iran’s power plants, added a new layer of risk to miners.
The network is already showing the stress. Severity fell 7.76% Saturday to 133.79 trillion, the second-biggest negative adjustment in 2026 after February’s 11.16% plunge during Winter Storm Fern. The difficulty is now nearly 10% below where it started the year, and well below November 2025’s all-time high of nearly 155 trillion.
The hashrate has pulled back to around 920 EH/s, well below the record high of 1 zetahash reached in 2025. Average block times in the last epoch stretched to 12 minutes and 36 seconds, well above the 10 minute target.
Hashprice, the metric tracking miners’ expected revenue per unit of computing power, hovers around $33.30 per petahash per second per day, according to Luxor’s Hashrate Index. That’s close to breakeven for most hardware and not far from the February 23 low of $28.
When miners cannot cover costs, they sell bitcoin to finance operations. This sell-off adds supply pressure to a market already dealing with 43% of total supply at a loss, whales distributing to rallies and leveraged positioning dominating price action. Mining economics is not just a sectoral story. They are a market structure story.
The listed miners have adapted by diversifying into AI and high-performance computing, which provide more predictable revenue than mining bitcoin at a loss. Marathon Digital, Cipher Mining and others have built data center capacity alongside their mining operations.
The next difficulty adjustment is expected in early April and is expected to drop further according to CoinWarz data. If bitcoin stays below $88,000 and there is no sign of a return to that level in the near term, the miner exodus will continue and the difficulty will continue to drop.
The network is self-correcting by design, making it cheaper to mine as participants travel. But the period between when costs exceed revenues and when difficulties adjust low enough to restore profitability is where the damage is done, both to miners and to the spot market that absorbs their forced sales.
