Bitcoin miners are losing on every coin produced as difficulty drops

helsinkiandrew

> When miners can't cover costs, they sell bitcoin to fund operations Surely they should stop producing until its profitable again, or am I missing something?

ece

Is there a SQQQ for BTC?

kingleopold

This is just a lie. Coindesk is the worst media in the world. They can't calculate correct price of mining because it's more complex and enerrgy costs are different in so many regions and inside the electiric producers etc. !

suryajena

Isn't AI the new hot thing, why are the miners still going after Bitcoin, when they can probably just use the same infra for AI and make more money, stay profitable.

dmk

The headline is dramatic but this is literally how bitcoin is designed to work. Miners leave, difficulty drops, costs go down, mining becomes profitable again. The interesting part isn’t the loss per coin, it’s how long the lag between unprofitable mining and difficulty adjustment keeps forced selling pressure on the market.

testing22321

Maybe a basic question - do miners use solar? Prices are dropping so fast it seems like the cheapest way to power mining rigs. Also free grid electricity for three hours a day in Australia will be interesting.

reenorap

If bitcoin miners are losing $19k for every bitcoin they mine, why would they sell bitcoin to continue funding their mining operations. That just makes it even less profitable because they are driving down the price of their remaining bitcoin. It makes more sense to shut their rigs off completely and wait for the price to rise. The funny thing about bitcoin is that the rate of bitcoin discovery doesn’t change when they shut off their rigs so it won’t change supply. It would actually make more sense to sell all their bitcoin, flood the market with coins to do the price, wait for large miners to collapse and then restart mining at hopefully lower prices.

expedition32

There's a reason why countries invented a central bank who decides how much currency gets printed.

paoliniluis

It's 2026 and there's still people that believe that proof-of-work makes sense as a consensus mechanism

Geee

No one is producing Bitcoin at loss, because it doesn't make any sense, but it might happen temporarily. Imagine the mining cost as a distribution curve, and bitcoin miners filling the distribution from the cheapest upwards to where the cost equals the revenue, i.e. the highest cost miner is at break-even, so that total of 3.125 (+transaction fees) bitcoin worth of hashrate is produced every 10 minutes. All but the highest cost miner operate at profit.

londons_explore

My understanding is lots of bitcoin farms use stolen electricity. Ie. Hidden away in a storage closet in a school or office, or in someone's house with an electric meter bypassed. If a decent chunk of mining does that, then it could become uneconomical for those who do pay for their power.

qweiopqweiop

Can someone convince me bitcoin mining isn't anything other than a huge waste of energy?

jrm4

My big picture take here; this is precisely why bitcoin itself could perhaps go to zero, and yet other cryptocurrencies could survive, aka the so-called "flippening." It may come to pass that "proof-of-work" was merely a good proof of concept to launch the idea; but proof-of-stake is (of course) better.

ur-whale

Sensationalistic headline. The compute supply/demand for mining is designed in the bitcoin algorithm to oscillate, and the mining game is about being able to forecast a complex combo of BTCUSD price, power price, hardware price and depreciation. Remarks like the title of this clickbait article are strictly meaningless, they assume the instantaneous price of bitcoin / power / hardware is what's used to compute profitability, when in practice mining is basically a futures market.

JohnMakin

Large amounts of btc mining are done via things like typo squatted images in compute clusters, or other compromised machines, the compute is stolen so the cost is effectively zero to the miner

krisknez

This title is incorrect. When mining difficulty drops, Bitcoin becomes easier and cheaper to mine, so miners usually make more money per coin, as long as the Bitcoin price stays the same.

abhinaystha

Just waiting what quantum computing would do to crypto.

dboreham

Shouldn't the price therefore go down? (Bitcoin should be an instrument the price of which correlates with the cost of the energy required to make new ones).

walrus01

If I had a dollar for every time, at some time in the past ten years, when the true believer bitcoin pumpers were saying things like "Bitcoin will be above a million per coin in the next five years!"... Yeah, about that....