The euphoria of October’s record highs has faded, and the industrial backbone of the Bitcoin network is facing a harsh reality check.
According to crypto slate According to the data, Bitcoin is currently trading around $78,000, which is down more than 38% from its all-time high of more than $126,000 just four months ago.
While a casual observer might see a standard market correction, the view from inside the mine is far more dire. Plummeting prices for flagship digital assets collide with still-high network difficulties and rising energy costs, creating a perfect storm for carriers.
Analytics firm CryptoQuant recently said that given the current combination of low prices and hardship, miners’ wages are “extremely low wages” and the P&L Sustainability Index has fallen to 21. This is the lowest figure since late 2024.
In particular, financial strains have already taken machines offline, resulting in Bitcoin’s total hashrate falling by around 12% since November last year, the steepest decline since China’s mining ban in 2021. This leaves the network at its weakest level since September 2025.
For a system that touts itself as the world’s most secure computer network, this is more than just a bear market story. This is a stress test of Bitcoin’s security model at a moment when miners have a higher-paying alternative.
Bitcoin miner surrender calculation
Bitcoin’s security relies on a simple incentive structure where the network pays a fixed block subsidy and transaction fees to whoever solves the next block.
In October, when the price was over $126,000, the “security budget” was enough to make up for the inefficiency. But with the price below $80,000, there is no longer any margin for error.
New numbers from mining pool f2pool show how severe the revenue compression has become.
The pool estimates the price of Bitcoin at around $76,176, the network hash rate at nearly 890 exahashes per second (EH/s), and the daily revenue for miners paying around $0.06 per kilowatt-hour at around $0.034 per terahash, in its Feb. 2 Hardware Power Cost Dashboard.
To put this into perspective, Luxor Technology’s hashrate index hit a spot hash price of nearly $39 per petahash per second (PH/s) per day just a few months ago.
This number is already thin by historical standards before falling towards an all-time low of around $35 as of this writing.
The current f2pool figure is $0.034 per terahash, which equates to $34 per PH/sec, confirming that miners are operating on historical floors.
Mapping these economics to individual machines reveals why hashrate is declining.
At a power cost of 6 cents, the same as Bitcoin’s reference price of $75,000, electricity accounts for approximately 52% of the revenue of Bitmain’s latest Antminer S21 These are the best numbers available.
When the efficiency curve worsens, the calculation result turns red. Mid-generation rigs like the Antminer S19 XP and Avalon A1466i have electricity rates around 92% to 100% in their price range.
On the other hand, older or less efficient models, such as the Avalon A1366, Whatsminer M50S, and S19 Pro line, will have electricity rates around 109% to 162%.
In layman’s terms, this means that for $75,000 in Bitcoin and mainstream power prices, a huge fleet of hardware is mining at a cash loss, before considering debt, hosting fees, and overhead costs.
AI escape hatch
This current collapse in earnings is different from previous crypto winters. That’s because miners’ distressed assets, such as power contracts and grid connections, have found new, deep-pocketed suitors.
The same infrastructure that enables Bitcoin mining is exactly what hyperscale AI computing requires. And unlike the struggling Bitcoin network, AI infrastructure providers are willing to pay.
CoreWeave, a former mining operation, has become emblematic of this change. The company pivoted from cryptocurrencies to become a “neocloud” specializing in AI workloads, and recently secured a $2 billion equity investment from Nvidia to accelerate its data center buildout.
In 2025, the company sought to acquire miner Core Scientific in a multibillion-dollar deal that explicitly framed the miner’s sites and power contracts as prime real estate for GPUs rather than ASICs.
Other public Bitcoin miners have also taken the hint and are making a major pivot towards AI. For example, Canadian carrier Hut 8 recently signed a 15-year lease for a 245-megawatt AI data center at its River Bend campus. The contract value is said to be approximately $7 billion.
This transaction effectively locks in long-term economics that are significantly different from the volatility of mining rewards.
For shareholders, these pivots provide a reasonable way out of the hemorrhage caused by a 30% price decline. They can exchange their cyclical Bitcoin earnings for contracted AI cash flows that investors currently value at a premium.
But for the Bitcoin network, this poses a more difficult problem. What if a component of your security infrastructure finds a business that offers higher rewards?
Bitcoin network security budget is under pressure
Jeff Feng, co-founder of Sei Labs, called this period the “biggest decline in Bitcoin miners since 2021” and argued that large-scale miners that have shifted their focus to AI calculations are amplifying the decline in Bitcoin.
The main difference from previous cycles is that this part of the hash will not simply power down until the price recovers. Permanently reassigned.
Once the 245 MW site is fully reracked for AI under a long-term lease, that power will actually no longer be available for future hashrate expansion.
Without a doubt, Bitcoin is very safe from an absolute point of view. Even after recent declines, the cost of accumulating enough hashing power to attack a network is still significant.
However, it is not the immediate collapse that is of concern, but the direction and composition. As the hashrate continually decreases, the marginal cost of an attack decreases.
Because online hashing is less honest, fewer resources are needed to capture a disruptive share of the network’s compute, whether you rent capacity or build it outright.
This trend is also narrowing the pool of stakeholders who are paid to protect the chain. Control over block production will become increasingly centralized as older, more costly operators exit and only a small number of ultra-efficient miners remain profitable.
This creates vulnerabilities that are hidden by the headline hashrate numbers.
Therefore, CryptoQuant’s “very low” label is effectively a warning that with today’s block rewards and fees, a significant portion of industrial hashing is operating at thin or negative margins.
This serves as a positive indicator of how robust a network’s security budget actually is compared to competing capital and power usage.
How do Bitcoin miners survive?
From here, a miner squeeze can affect Bitcoin’s evolution in several different ways.
One path is quiet integration. Difficulty is reset, the most efficient operators get a larger share of block generation, and hashrate increases more slowly than in previous cycles, but remains large enough that outside experts barely notice it.
For investors, the main impact is volatility. This is because drawdowns in each market narrow down the group of miners, resulting in increased selling and hedging behavior.
An alternative path would accelerate Bitcoin’s transition to fee-driven security sooner than the halving schedule alone suggests. If subsidies remain low relative to AI revenue, the ecosystem may need to rely more on transaction fees to keep miners fully engaged.
That could mean more emphasis on high-value payments at the base layer, more activity in second-layer systems, and widespread acceptance that block space is a scarce resource rather than a cheap commodity.
The third, more speculative pass makes the external backstop explicit. This means that institutions that regularize spot Bitcoin ETFs may eventually view security budgets as something that requires intentional support, just like bank capital ratios.
That could take the form of increased fees for certain transaction classes, industry-funded incentives for miners, or scrutiny of AI transformations that significantly reduce hashrate in key regions.
Notably, none of these results require breaking Bitcoin’s core design. It all comes down to the industry deciding how much it is willing to pay to keep hashes on the network rather than on GPU clusters in a more crowded energy market.
The f2pool dashboard now provides a snapshot of that negotiation. The system, which has a computational power of about 890 exahashes per second and costs about $76,000, pays about 3.5 cents per terahash per day for security.
Whether future energy investments accept that rate or demand something closer to AI economics will determine how the mining market ultimately pivots.
(Tag Translation) Bitcoin
