CheckOnChain’s difficulty regression model, which estimates average production costs based on network difficulty and energy input, pegged the figure at $88,000 per bitcoin as of March 13.
As of Sunday Bitcoin is trading at $69,200, creating a difference of about $19,000 per coin and meaning the average miner is operating at a 21% loss on each block mined.
Costs have been falling since the October crash that sent Bitcoin from $126,000 to below $70,000, but the Iran war has accelerated it. Oil above $100 directly contributes to the cost of electricity for mining operations, an estimated 8-10% of the global hashrate operating in energy markets particularly sensitive to Middle Eastern supply.
The Strait of Hormuz, which handles about 20% of the world’s oil and gas flows, remains effectively closed to most commercial traffic. And Trump’s 48-hour ultimatum on Saturday, which threatened to attack Iran’s power plants, added a new layer of risk for miners.
The network is already showing stress.
Difficulty fell 7.76% on Saturday to $133.79 trillion, the second-largest negative adjustment of 2026 after an 11.16% decline during Winter Storm Fern in February. Difficulty is now about 10% below where it started the year and well below the all-time high of around $155 trillion set in November 2025.
The hashrate has retreated to around 920 EH/s, well below the record 1 zettahash level reached in 2025. The average block time during the last era increased to 12 minutes and 36 seconds, which is well above the target of 10 minutes.
According to Luxor’s Hashrate Index, the hashprice, an expected metric tracking miner revenue per unit of computing power, is hovering around $33.30 per petahash per second per day. This is close to breakeven for most hardware and not far from the all-time low of $28 on February 23.
When miners cannot cover costs, they sell Bitcoins to fund operations. That selling adds to supply pressure in a market that is already losing 43% of total supply, with whales distributing into rallies, and leveraged positioning dominating the price action. Mining economics is not the story of just one sector. They are a market structure story.
Publicly traded miners are adapting by diversifying into AI and high-performance computing, which provide more predictable revenue than loss-making Bitcoin mining. Marathon Digital, Cipher Mining and others are building data center capacity alongside their mining operations.
The next difficulty adjustment is anticipated to occur in early April and further declines are expected, according to Coinwarz data. If Bitcoin remains below $88,000, and there is no sign of a return to that level in the near term, the exodus of miners continues, and the difficulty continues to decrease.
The network self-corrects by design, making mining cheaper when participants leave. But there is a period between when costs exceed revenues and when the difficulty becomes low enough to restore profitability, where losses are incurred, both to miners and to the spot market, which absorbs their forced sales.
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