The Bitcoin (BTC) mining hashprice — a miner’s daily revenue per unit of hash power expended to mine blocks — has remained constant at around $48 per petahash per second (PH/s), despite a slight 1.4% uptick in Bitcoin difficulty.
Data from CoinWarz shows that the Bitcoin difficulty climbed to 113.76 trillion at block 889,081 on March 23, up from the 112.1 trillion difficulty in the previous epoch.
According to TheMinerMag, a hashprice below $50 places financial stress on miners running older hardware such as the Antminer S19 XP and S19 Pro.
The older hardware, coupled with declining network transaction fees, risks pushing some miners into unprofitable territory — forcing them to turn off their hardware until they upgrade their application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) or network conditions change.
Mining firms have been struggling since the April 2024 Bitcoin halving, which slashed the block subsidy to 3.125 BTC per block mined, generally increasing network difficulty, and the recent downturn in the crypto markets due to macroeconomic uncertainty.
Bitcoin mining difficulty. Source: CoinWarz
Related: SEC says proof-of-work mining does not constitute securities dealing
Miners have a rough start to 2025
Research from financial services firm JPMorgan shows that publicly listed Bitcoin mining companies collectively lost 22% of their share value in February 2025.
Even miners who diversified operations into artificial intelligence and high-performance computing data centers to shore up revenue lost through mining activities are facing financial pressures, the JPMorgan report found.
The financial services firm pointed to the release of DeepSeek R1 — an open-source AI model trained at a fraction of the cost of leading models yet performing on par with closed-source alternatives — as a source of strain on large AI data centers.
Although the Bitcoin network’s hashrate oscillates in the short term, the long-term trend is up only. Source: CryptoQuant
A steadily rising network hashrate, which is the sum total computing power in the Bitcoin network, is also creating increased competition among miners, who must expend greater computing resources to remain profitable.
Fears of a prolonged trade war between the United States and Canada, alongside constant tariff headlines, have put miners on edge.
Threats from Canadian officials to levy tariffs on energy exports to the United States place even more pressure on the already struggling industry.
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