The Bitcoin
BTCUSD
mining hashprice — the daily earnings for miners per unit of hashing power used to mine blocks — has remained steady at approximately $48 per petahash per second (PH/s), despite a modest 1.4% increase in Bitcoin difficulty.
Data from CoinWarz indicates that the Bitcoin difficulty rose to 113.76 trillion at block 889,081 on March 23, up from 112.1 trillion difficulty in the previous epoch.
As reported by TheMinerMag, a hashprice below $50 poses financial challenges for miners operating older hardware like the Antminer S19 XP and S19 Pro.
The combination of older hardware and decreasing network transaction fees threatens to drive some miners into unprofitable conditions, compelling them to shut down their operations until they either upgrade their application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) or until market conditions improve.
Mining companies have been facing difficulties since the April 2024 Bitcoin halving event, which reduced the block reward to 3.125 BTC per mined block, generally escalating network difficulty, compounded by recent downturns in the cryptocurrency market due to macroeconomic uncertainties.
Miners face a challenging start to 2025
Research conducted by financial services firm JPMorgan reveals that publicly traded Bitcoin mining companies collectively saw a 22% decline in their share value in February 2025.
Even miners who have diversified into artificial intelligence and high-performance computing data centers to compensate for losses in their mining operations are experiencing financial strains, according to the JPMorgan report.
The financial services firm pointed out that the release of DeepSeek R1, an open-source AI model trained at a fraction of the cost of leading models yet performing comparably to proprietary AI products, adds pressure on large AI data centers.
A consistently increasing network hashrate, representing the total computing power within the Bitcoin network, is also intensifying competition among miners who need to use more computing resources to maintain profitability.
Concerns about a prolonged trade conflict between the United States and Canada, coupled with ongoing tariff discussions, have heightened anxiety among miners.
Threats from Canadian authorities to impose tariffs on energy exports to the United States are placing additional strain on an already struggling industry.
