The math has turned against bitcoin miners and the war is making things worse every week.
Checkonchain’s difficulty regression model, which estimates average production costs based on network difficulty and energy inputs, pegged the figure at $88,000 per bitcoin as of March 13.
Bitcoin is trading at $69,200 on Sunday morning, creating a gap of nearly $19,000 per coin and meaning the average miner is trading at a 21% loss on every block produced.
Cost cutting has been increasing since the October crisis took bitcoin from $126,000 to below $70,000, but the Iran war accelerated it. Oil above $100 directly fuels electricity costs for mining operations, particularly the estimated 8% to 10% of the global hashrate operating in the Middle East’s supply-sensitive energy markets.
The Strait of Hormuz, through which approximately 20% of global oil and gas flows pass, remains effectively closed to most commercial traffic. And Trump’s 48-hour ultimatum on Saturday threatening to attack Iran’s power plants added a new layer of risk for miners.
The network is already showing the stress. The difficulty fell 7.76% on Saturday to 133.79 trillion, the second largest negative adjustment of 2026 after February’s 11.16% drop during Winter Storm Fern. The difficulty is now almost 10% below where it started the year and well below the all-time high in November 2025, close to 155 trillion.
The hash rate has dropped to approximately 920 EH/s, well below the record level of 1 zetahash reached in 2025. Average block times during the last epoch extended to 12 minutes and 36 seconds, well above the 10-minute target.
Hashprice, the metric that tracks miners’ expected revenue per unit of computing power, is around $33.30 per petahash per second per day, according to Luxor’s Hashrate Index. That’s close to breakeven for most hardware and not far from the all-time low of $28 hit on February 23.
When miners cannot cover costs, they sell bitcoins to finance operations. That selling adds supply pressure to a market already facing 43% of total supply at losses, whales spreading out in rallies, and leveraged positioning dominating price action. The mining economy is not just a sectoral story. They are a story of market structure.
Publicly traded miners have been adapting by diversifying into artificial intelligence and high-performance computing, which offer more predictable income than mining bitcoins at a loss. Marathon Digital, Cipher Mining and others have been building out their data center capacity alongside their mining operations.
The next difficulty adjustment is scheduled for early April and is expected to decrease further based on data from CoinWarz. If bitcoin remains below $88,000 and there are no signs of a return to that level in the short term, the exodus of miners continues and the difficulty continues to fall.
The network is self-correcting by design, making it cheaper to mine when participants leave. But the period between the time costs exceed revenue and the time difficulty is adjusted low enough to restore profitability is where the damage occurs, both for the miners and the spot market that absorbs their forced sales.
