Bitcoin Mining Profitability Is Near an All-Time Low—Why?

Although the Bitcoin network’s fourth ‘halving’ event occurred more than two months ago, its repercussions have continued to impact Bitcoin miners, making the industry’s profit margins tighter than ever.

According to Hashrate Index, Bitcoin’s “hash price” tapped an all-time low on May 1, falling to just $44.76 per petahash/second (PH/s), per day. The metric quantifies how much money a miner can expect to earn daily at a specific hash rate.

Bitcoin “hash rate” is the rate at which Bitcoin miners can produce guesses to solve the mathematical problems required to mine a Bitcoin block, and earn freshly printed BTC as a reward. One petahash equals one quadrillion hashes.

Participating in that game requires specialized and power-hungry computer equipment with access to affordable electricity to keep them running. As global competition grows over time, margins for individual miners shrink, pushing all but the most efficient firms into net losses.

The day before the halving, April 19, Bitcoin’s daily hash price was $92.20. What immediately followed—excluding a brief Runes-driven spike in fee revenue—was a steep drop to $57.53 as of April 25.

Since then, the hash price has mostly risen and fallen alongside Bitcoin’s price. With BTC back on the decline this month, miner profitability is reapproaching its early May lows at a daily hash price of $48.29.

Bitcoin Mining Difficulty Is Plummeting—Here’s Why

Bitcoin just got much easier to mine—should we be worried?  Data from BTC.com shows that Bitcoin mining difficulty plunged nearly 6% to 83.1 trillion hashes yesterday. The higher the mining difficulty—measured through the energy and resources that miners use to keep the network secure—the more difficult Bitcoin is to attack. A drop in difficulty, therefore, isn’t a good sign. But it’s expected, at least in the short term, experts told Decrypt. Bitcoin Mining Difficulty Hits All-Time High One Wee...

The lack of profitability is clearly affecting Bitcoin miner behavior. The total Bitcoin hash rate has now declined 13% from its post-halving peak to just 564 exahashes (one quintillion hashes) per second (EH/s)—indicating that many miners are taking their unprofitable machines offline.

Analysis from CryptoQuant shows that miners have also been offloading more BTC to exchanges this month, signaling that they may need extra cash to cover their costs. For example, Marathon Digital had sold 1,400 BTC in June as of June 10, compared to only 390 BTC throughout all of May.

Still, miner stocks on the whole don’t appear to be suffering. Though performance varies from company to company, the Valkyrie Bitcoin Miners ETF (WGMI)—which provides exposure across the Bitcoin mining industry—is up 25% over the last month, reaching a 2024 high in June. By comparison, Bitcoin is down 11%, and big-time Bitcoin investor MicroStrategy (MSTR) is down 13%.

Edited by Ryan Ozawa.