The math is turning against Bitcoin miners and the war is making the situation worse every week.
Checkonchain’s difficulty regression model estimates average production costs based on network difficulty and energy input, and as of March 13, this number is pegged at $88,000 per Bitcoin.
Bitcoin was trading at $69,200 as of Sunday morning, a difference of nearly $19,000 per coin, meaning the average miner is losing 21% for each block produced.
Cost pressures have been increasing since the October crash, when the price of Bitcoin fell from $126,000 to below $70,000, and the Iran war has exacerbated the pressure. Oil above $100 directly impacts electricity costs for mining operations, particularly the estimated 8-10% of global hashrate operating in supply-sensitive energy markets in the Middle East.
The Strait of Hormuz, which handles about 20% of the world’s oil and gas flows, remains effectively closed to most commercial traffic. And on Saturday, President Trump’s 48-hour ultimatum, threatening to attack Iranian power plants, added new risks for miners.
Networks are already under stress. Difficulty fell 7.76% to 133.79 trillion on Saturday, the second-largest negative adjustment in 2026 after February’s 11.16% plunge during Winter Storm Fern. The difficulty level is now nearly 10% below where it was at the beginning of the year and well below the all-time high of nearly 155 trillion in November 2025.
The hashrate has retreated to around 920 EH/s, well below the record 1 zetahash level reached in 2025. The average block time for the last epoch increased to 12 minutes and 36 seconds, significantly exceeding the goal of 10 minutes.
Hashprice, a metric that tracks expected miner revenue per unit of computing power, is hovering around $33.30 per petahash per second per day, according to Luxor’s Hashrate Index. This is close to breakeven for most hardware and not far from the all-time low of $28 hit on February 23rd.
If miners cannot cover their costs, they will sell Bitcoin to fund their operations. This sell-off adds supply pressure to a market that is already 43% of total supply in the red, with whales dispersing into rallies and leveraged positioning dominating price movements. The mining economy is more than just a sector. They are about market structure.
Publicly traded miners are adapting by diversifying into AI and high-performance computing, which offer more predictable returns than mining Bitcoin at a loss. Marathon Digital, Cipher Mining, and others have been increasing their data center capacity in parallel with their mining operations.
According to CoinWarz data, the next difficulty adjustment is scheduled for early April and is expected to drop further. If Bitcoin remains below $88,000 and shows no signs of returning to that level in the near term, the miner exodus will continue and the difficulty level will continue to drop.
The network is self-correcting by design, making mining cheaper even if participants leave. However, in the period between costs exceeding revenues and difficulty adjusting low enough to restore profitability, both miners and the spot market that absorbs their forced sales are harmed.
