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Live markets: Bitcoin has traded below its mining cost for five months, squeezing miners
Key takeaways
- The bank pegs the cost to mine one bitcoin at about $78,000, well above the roughly $62,500 the asset fetches now.
- When the price drops below cost, higher-cost miners power down, the hashrate, or total computing power securing the network, falls, and mining difficulty, the automatic setting for how hard it is to mine, resets lower.
- That played out in early June, when difficulty dropped 10%, the second decline of that size this year.
The bank pegs the cost to mine one bitcoin at about $78,000, well above the roughly $62,500 the asset fetches now.
The strain is showing and about 20% of miners are now unprofitable, the bank said citing CoinShares data, and publicly traded miners sold more than 32,000 bitcoin in the first quarter to cover operating costs, more than they offloaded in all of 2025.
The network is adjusting on its own. When the price drops below cost, higher-cost miners power down, the hashrate, or total computing power securing the network, falls, and mining difficulty, the automatic setting for how hard it is to mine, resets lower.
Article preview — originally published by CoinDesk. Full story at the source.
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