Bitcoin Miners are Losing $8,000 for Each BTC Mined, Hashrate Drops
Bitcoin hashrate and mining difficulty have been dropping since November 2025, as Bitcoin miners could have been mining unprofitably according to average cost data.
In particular, data Coinspeaker retrieved from MacroMicro shows a net-negative difference of over $8,000 between Bitcoin’s average mining cost and its market price as of Jan. 19, 2026. By the time of this writing, mining 1 Bitcoin cost approximately $101,000, while the cryptocurrency was trading at around $93,000. The platform gets its average from calculations based on Cambridge University-provided data.
"Through observing consumption of electricity and daily issuance of bitcoin, provided by Cambridge University, we can find out the average mining costs of bitcoin. When mining costs are lower than bitcoin’s market value, more miners will join. When mining costs are higher than a miner’s revenue, number of miners will decrease,” MacroMicro wrote.
This happens because mining Bitcoin is a competitive activity that requires significant loads of computation and energy. The more miners competing for the prize, the harder it becomes to mine a block, and the more expensive the activity becomes. On the other hand, the contrary effect happens when miners leave the network due to low profitability—balancing the difficulty and average cost accordingly.
However, Bitcoin miners may choose to continue mining currently unprofitable BTC, effectively paying a premium for the coins, if they believe its price will increase in the long run. Again, the opposite is also true, as miners could decide to stop mining if they foresee lower prices ahead.