: : [Crypto/Issue] More Mined, Less Earned: Inside the 2026 Bitcoin Miners
Written by c4lvin

- While the price of Bitcoin fell to less than half its peak, mining costs actually rose. Hashprice stayed in breakeven territory for more than two months, and MARA, Riot, CleanSpark, American Bitcoin, and Bitdeer all posted net losses in the second quarter. As a result, mining difficulty has declined for ten straight months since its October 2025 peak of 155.97T, falling to 125.81T. A prolonged decline of this kind, with no external event like China's 2021 mining ban behind it, is virtually unprecedented.

- Publicly listed miners sold more than 32,000 BTC in the first quarter alone, the largest quarterly sale on record. This cash is not being used simply to ride out the downturn. It is moving into power infrastructure, including power plant acquisitions, long-term AI data center leases, and full pivots to AI cloud services. As a result, the hashrate of listed miners fell 13.4% in six months, a faster decline than the network as a whole (-10.6%), and the stock market has endorsed this direction by assigning lower valuations to the companies that mine the most.

- The late-August rally lifted hashprice 43% from its June low and out of breakeven territory, yet hashrate has stayed flat at around 900 EH/s. For the first time in well over a decade, hashrate has stopped tracking price. This confirms that the equipment and power already assigned to AI are unlikely to come back to mining.

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