Discussion

Bitcoin miners are losing $19,000 on every BTC produced as difficulty drops 7.8%

helsinkiandrew: > When miners can't cover costs, they sell bitcoin to fund operationsSurely they should stop producing until its profitable again, or am I missing something?

ceejayoz: You're missing that humans are often irrational.They may be hoping it goes back up.

suryajena: Isn't AI the new hot thing, why are the miners still going after Bitcoin, when they can probably just use the same infra for AI and make more money, stay profitable.

kingleopold: This is just a lie. Coindesk is the worst media in the world.They can't calculate correct price of mining because it's more complex and enerrgy costs are different in so many regions and inside the electiric producers etc. !

ece: Is there a SQQQ for BTC?

isubkhankulov: You can take stable-coins, borrow bitcoin against them and sell them. (Fully or over-collateralized). Then buy back bitcoin if/when it drops.If you’re wrong, you lose your stable-coins.Let us know how it goes :)

dmk: The headline is dramatic but this is literally how bitcoin is designed to work. Miners leave, difficulty drops, costs go down, mining becomes profitable again. The interesting part isn’t the loss per coin, it’s how long the lag between unprofitable mining and difficulty adjustment keeps forced selling pressure on the market.

Aperocky: This only works when the difficult drop rates are below miner leaving rates.Which in normal times, are something taken for granted, but once it does happen, the edge case collapse the entire system.

Snoozus: If everyone stopped mining transactions couldn't go through anymore and the value of bitcoin would drop. If you're heavily invested in bitcoin that's bad. Also miners try to squeeze in their preferred transactions which they can't do when they're not mining. Finally the costs dont drop to zero when you turn the miners off, so the loss from mining might be less than the loss when not mining.

samrus: No but if more miners leave then dofficulty with drop faster right? Its modelling supply and demand curves which are a stable equilibrium in these circumstances

acidphreak2k: When I was mining circa 2017 - 2021 (approx. 1 BTC/month and 25-30 ETH/month) and planning it all out, I prepared myself psychologically to operate for up to 2 years without any profits or selling. It was a hard pill to swallow and a huge risk; my costs were $8500/month in electrical and then another ~$2200 on a lease for the warehouse. When it dropped to $3,000/BTC a few months after I came online and stayed there for 6-8 months, I started wondering if I was the biggest dumbass in my county.Thankfully, it all worked out in the end very well. I don't know how anyone would put in the effort/money to get a major crypto farm going and plan to just cash out every month to pay bills. What's the point? I always thought of it as a long-term bet on the price going way up, which it did.

VladVladikoff: Seems like you could have made that same bet by just buying BTC with that money and doing twice as good.

derangedHorse: He's not saying everyone, just the ones who are unprofitable. Not everyone mines bitcoin at the same cost. The ones who do have to stop can also profit from curtailment depending on the price of energy relative to hash profit.

knocte: > below miner leaving rates.What does this mean, sorry?> the edge case collapse the entire system.If you mean that if it reaches a certain point, the entire system will collapse, it means you don't understand the difficulty adjustment. If it's too expensive to mine, then some miners leave, which makes blocktimes be longer, but not to worry because the consequence of that it just that difficulty will go down, which means that you need less hashrate to mine (and maybe some of those miners that leave will come back because it is profitable again for them). This means that it is essentially impossible for all miners to leave at the same time; some of them stay even if at a loss, and some of them are just hobbyists that can already feed their miners with solar power (so there's really no loss for them in leaving them connected).

martinflack: [delayed]

raverbashing: YupThe problem with BTC going down is that it's a double whammy of not only BTC going down but also the cost of its shovels going upBefore: BTC pays $100k but a shovel costs $300Now: BTC pays $70k but a shovel costs $$??Bitcoin asked the right questions but came back with the wrong answers

derangedHorse: I don't think you know what you're talking about. If the difficulty lowers at a lower rate than miners leaving then the difficulty rate will stop dropping.

andai: What's a shovel?

metrix: They're using the analogy of mining for gold. the cost of a shovel/pitchfork goes up when the price of gold goes down - which is a double whammy

illiac786: What does “leave” in this context mean?

the_mitsuhiko: Difficulty only adjusts every 2016 blocks. If the system gets out of whack enough it could slow down to a crawl for an extended period of time.In practice it’s not much of an issue because bitcoin is not use for commerce but it’s a store of value and it some of the trades are not even on chain.

OJFord: I mined in 2014 with free electricity and that was true even then. That's with hindsight though, the mining reward is more predictable than that market price would increase (more than) equivalently.

RichardLake: Might be wrong about what Aperocky is alluding to but there is an entirely theoretical edge case. The time to the next difficulty adjustment is based on the current speed of mining, and the possible change in difficulty is capped. With enough minors leaving it will drop the speed of mining/network speed/ and push out the expected time to the next difficulty adjustment. I can't think of any realistic way this can occur given the miners that stay will (personally) be producing blocks as often, the increase in time being balanced out by being a larger proportionate of the mining rate. They don't care if they get 1% of the blocks, which average about 20 mins per block or 5% of the blocks that average 100mins per block.

illiac786: Isn’t mining and transactions separate? Sure you need to have online participants, but they don’t have to actively mine, right?

OJFord: No, mining is exactly what makes transactions go through, computing the next result in chain, certifying that the transaction happened.

tromp: Turn off their mining rigs.

eru: Or use it for other coins.

jfengel: Stop mining.

mathgeek: It’s not a lie, nor a damn lie. It’s statistics!

littlecranky67: Exactly: "The average production cost was sitting at $88,000 per bitcoin in mid-March". Emphasis on average. Just as in a free market, those miners with higher mining costs are priced out of the market. Or are pressured to become more efficient. Those that are below-average probably already are efficient.

ajross: "stop"(Obviously the equipment doesn't go away. You can start it again. But if you can't make a buck doing something, you won't do it.)

illiac786: But I mean, their bitcoins are not going away, their wallets are still there, their bitcoins also right? I thought bitcoin mining was proportionally hard to the number of already mined bitcoins, not the number of people mining?I probably should look this up in wikipedia first.

haakon: It's a common misunderstanding that mining just gets harder and harder as time goes by and more coins are minted. It's often misreported that way. But in fact, the difficulty is dynamic and adjusts itself to keep minting at the predetermined rate regardless of the number of participants. Mining has gotten harder on long timelines, but only because more computing power has been added.

shlant: you didn't answer the question. A shovel in this case is the equipment + energy needed to mine (GPU's etc.)

raverbashing: Which is obvious to anyone who has heard of bitcoin in the year of our lord 2026

xigoi: Doesn’t that contradict the Wikipedia article?> Miners who successfully create a new block with a valid nonce can collect transaction fees from the included transactions and a fixed reward in bitcoins. To claim this reward, a special transaction called a coinbase is included in the block, with the miner as the payee. All bitcoins in existence have been created through this type of transaction. This reward is halved every 210,000 blocks until ₿21 million have been issued in total, which is expected to occur around the year 2140. Afterward, miners will only earn from transaction fees.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin (emphasis mine)

tromp: As you can see on https://www.f2pool.com/coins other coins using SHA256 as PoW algorithm only amount to about 1% of Bitcoin's daily dollars of Pow Produced, so if any nontrivial amount of hash moves there, then those will soon become unprofitable too.

reenorap: If bitcoin miners are losing $19k for every bitcoin they mine, why would they sell bitcoin to continue funding their mining operations. That just makes it even less profitable because they are driving down the price of their remaining bitcoin. It makes more sense to shut their rigs off completely and wait for the price to rise.The funny thing about bitcoin is that the rate of bitcoin discovery doesn’t change when they shut off their rigs so it won’t change supply. It would actually make more sense to sell all their bitcoin, flood the market with coins to do the price, wait for large miners to collapse and then restart mining at hopefully lower prices.

klodolph: > […] why would they sell bitcoin to continue funding their mining operations […]There are usually some fixed costs involved and you need cash flow. Without cash flow, your business can shut down pretty damn fast. With cash flow, your business can stay around longer, maybe long enough for the economics to shift.This sort of thing happens with oil. There are oil producers which sell at a loss. There was even a brief moment when the price of an oil barrel went negative, which meant that if you gave somebody a barrel of oil, you had to pay them for the privilege of taking that oil off your hands. Oil producers did not all shut down when that happened.I am a little doubtful of the $19k figure anyway.> It would actually make more sense to sell all their bitcoin, flood the market with coins to do the price, wait for large miners to collapse and then restart mining at hopefully lower prices.This kind of market manipulation is not so straightforward.

JKCalhoun: If "difficulty drops, costs go down" so ought the price? Isn't that basic economics? Or are they chasing the "phase difference", lag, between supply demand?

maxerickson: The mining reward isn't a direct transaction that has a price.Competing for it is more of a game that has a cost to participate in.

expedition32: A perpetual boom bust cycle? Sounds healthy.

vscode-rest: Hash mining asics don’t work well for AI

haakon: This is true, but large miners also have beneficial electricity contracts and data center capacity, both suitable for AI workloads.

expedition32: There's a reason why countries invented a central bank who decides how much currency gets printed.

igsomething: It is a negative feedback loop, so yes, it makes systems stable.

singpolyma3: What? That's not true. You don't need more than one CPU miner online for tx to go through. That's why there are difficulty adjustments.

raincole: The reward of each block will only get smaller. But the power needs to mine a block is dynamic.

bawolff: Difficulty and block rewards are separate things. There is no contradiction here.Block reward stays constant, amount of work required (on average) to get a block reward is dynamic in order to make it so that total number of rewards given out over a length of time stays roughly constant.So if too many block rewards are claimed in a given time frame, difficulty is increased to slow things down. If not enough are claimed then difficulty decreases to make it easier to get one.

paoliniluis: It's 2026 and there's still people that believe that proof-of-work makes sense as a consensus mechanism

didgetmaster: It sounds very similar to things like oil production, gold mining, and even farming. When the price is high, everyone wants in on the action. As supply explodes, the prices drop. Once prices get low enough, the costs to pump the next barrel of oil, find the next ounce of gold, or harvest the next acre of a certain crop; exceed the reward. When that happens, wells are shut down, mining operations suspended, and different crops planted. The cycle begins again.

andy81: Price isn't affected by mining difficulty, only the other direction.

AlOwain: Regression to the mean. The alternative is no adjustment at all.

KellyCriterion: > There was even a brief moment when the price of an oil barrel went negativeMore accurate: The price for an _option_ to buy/sell oil was negative, not the price of the barrell itself.

eterm: There's a soft failure-mode for bitcoin where due to the alternating difficulty adjustment, you could end up with people only mining every other 2016-block adjustment.Let's call this cycle A and cycle B.If A is too hard, miners drop out, cycle B gets easier, miners flood back, cycle A gets harder.This results in the hard cycle getting longer and the easy cycle getting shorter.This isn't completely critical as there is I believe a small damping effect, so it isn't completely lethal to bitcoin, but a key thing about bitcoin mining is that whether other people are mining or not doesn't actually affect your own profitiability.Other people dropping out doesn't actually mean you get more bitcoins per hour/watt, it only affects the next difficulty adjustment as a secondary effect.

nytesky: But as number of miners drop arent btc at risk of a 50% attack?

chistev: Satoshi thought of everything, man.

AlOwain: I am not certain; but, costs do not have a causative relationship to prices. Prices only go down because as the cost of production goes down, supply increases. It is a correlative relationship.Bitcoin's supply won't increase as costs go down, unlike other assets.

Joker_vD: > costs do not have a causative relationship to prices. Prices only go down because as the cost of production goes down, supply increases.Um. That's a causative relationship, even if it's mediated, but it's still causative. And generally, the relationship is even more direct: the suppliers are quite reluctant to sell at the price lower than their costs unless they expect the prices go up soon enough™, so the lower boundaries for the prices exist.

londons_explore: The damping effect is that part of your costs are the hardware, space, depreciation etc. leaving that stuff idle costs money - so it makes sense to mine in the less profitable periods too.

Scholmo: Its still true and shows one of many issues with bitcoin.Based on bitcoin cryptobros, you need a certain amount of independent miners for the 'quality' of bitcoins. A bitcoin miner if its a state, can operate with a loss a lot longer if not even infinit, than the decentralized normal people (who do not exist anyway).It also creates a lot of pressure on miners if you do not run your gpus, yuou are also at a loss, which can break the mining for everyone if too many in parallel go offline, than go olnine again because difficulty droped to much.And if it becomes to volatile, no one wants to risk it anymore

bdcravens: > if you do not run your gpusBitcoin hasn't been viably mineable on GPUs for over ten years. It requires specialized hardware.As such, mining is typically restricted to those with massive capital investment in a single-purpose, so you really won't see random offloading and onloading of that capacity. As long as it's marginally profitable (with capital investment being a sunk cost, this is the price where it's more than ongoing costs), those miners will keep their machines running.

mathgeek: Article covers that briefly.

suryajena: > The publicly traded miners have been adapting by diversifying into AI and high-performance computing, which offer more predictable revenue than mining bitcoin at a loss. Marathon Digital, Cipher Mining, and others have been building out data center capacity alongside their mining operations.Yes, it does but lacks depth, the problem here is they are diversifying not pivoting and by virtue of game theory for each miner they stand to win on others exit, as the mining difficulty goes down, but this is creating a loss-loss situation.

Nursie: There is an interesting missing link in the feedback cycle with Bitcoin though - the same amount is produced regardless, supply does not contract with demand.

arbuge: I'm far from a crypto expert but aren't costs largely GPUs and electricity here?Those are now being driven by massive AI demand and are likely to remain so for the forseeable future. So how would costs go down?

vardump: I don't think GPUs are competitive at all. You need specialized mining rigs with bitcoin mining specialized chips.

xigoi: Sure, but that’s not what miners care about. The power needed to get a given amount of money doubles whenever the reward is halved.

kristjansson: No, the price of a contract for future delivery to a specific location went negative just before the delivery date, at a time when there was almost no unoccupied oil storage nor transport capacity at said location.In the circumstance you might sell your right to some oil for almost nothing rather than deal with the consequences of accepting it. You might even pay someone to take it off your hands.Options is “right but not obligation”. Physically settled futures are an obligation at maturity.

acidphreak2k: Up to a point; once it was over $12k or so, it was cheaper to mine them than to buy them. But yeah, I guess in retrospect I could have just dumped ~$450k into buying BTC when it was at $3,000 and made 3x what I ended up making, but there were other considerations for why I did it at the time. The mining was co-located with my cannabis grow/operations, and in many ways the mining was started secondary to that, even though the mining ended up being a little more profitable over the life of the facility

red_admiral: > The [bitcoin] mining was co-located with my cannabis grow/operationsHN quote of the day!

duskdozer: How could the option price go below 0? Why couldn't someone just not exercise it in that case?

fooker: Counterintuitively that’s the definition of healthy in economics.If you don’t have busts, at some point your system will abruptly/violently cease to exist.

patapong: But mining costs are (cost of equipment+cost of electricity)/total coins mined, so can miners not end up in a situation where they need to keep mining to pay off equipment despite the individual coins being unprofitable?

comprev: It's no different to a mortgage being in negative equity as the home owner would still be in debt after selling the property.

rokkamokka: Bitcoin is no longer mined by GPUs but by ASICs

vaelin: The cost of finding a block goes down because it becomes less difficult.The goal in proof of work is to find a block hash less than a given value. That value is determined by the difficulty. The lower the value, the more difficult it is to find a block, and thus the more expensive it will be to mine.Difficulty is adjusted once every two weeks to target an average block time of 10 minutes. If the average block time during the preceding 2 weeks is less than 10 minutes, it means that blocks were too easy to find (i.e. the difficulty was too low relative to total hash rate of the network). Conversely, if the average block time was greater than 10 minutes, the difficulty was too great.This is how it the network has maintained a roughly 10 minute block time as the hash rate of the network has grown over the past 16 years. Difficulty, and thus cost, is constantly being adjusted.

Geee: No one is producing Bitcoin at loss, because it doesn't make any sense, but it might happen temporarily. Imagine the mining cost as a distribution curve, and bitcoin miners filling the distribution from the cheapest upwards to where the cost equals the revenue, i.e. the highest cost miner is at break-even, so that total of 3.125 (+transaction fees) bitcoin worth of hashrate is produced every 10 minutes. All but the highest cost miner operate at profit.

tgsovlerkhgsel: > No one is producing Bitcoin at loss, because it doesn't make any senseThe cost of producing bitcoin is a combination of the marginal cost (running the miner you already have, i.e. mostly power) and paying for the miner that you bought.If you buy a miner expecting a certain profitability but then the economics change, you can both end up with a loss long term (never able to recoup the cost of the miner) and still be better off continuing to mine (because the cost of the miner is a sunk cost, and as long as the revenue is larger than the marginal cost of running it, you'll at least recoup some of it).

rayiner: [delayed]

axus: I think you're right, it's counterintuitive but less competition means less rewards to share for those who keep mining. Though transaction fees / hour shouldn't decrease, maybe your share of that is bigger.

KellyCriterion: Thanks for correction, that is true!(Both instruments are not that popular in my country, so my daily language is to put both of them as synonym, while they are different animals in some details)

kristjansson: There are cash settled futures there are closer to options in that they’re purely financial, but even those don’t have optionality at maturity.Generally a dangerous thing to have as synonyms regardless, otherwise you end up with a coal barge in the east river https://thedailywtf.com/articles/special-delivery

tgsovlerkhgsel: If you've already bought a miner, you will mine until the price of electricity exceeds the revenue from mining. If what's left over after paying for the electricity isn't enough to pay for the cost of the miners (and other already-committed fixed costs), you might make a loss, but still be incentivized to continue to at least recoup some of the loss.

raincole: I honestly don't know which part of "the difficulty being dynamic" is this hard to understand.> The power needed to get a given amount of money doubles whenever the reward is halved.Yes, by that moment it does.And some miners still stop mining if mining became too unprofitable.And the difficulty will decrease because less miners are mining.And the power needed to get a given amount of bitcoin will decrease. (Not necessarily to the level before halving, ofc)

raincole: This is exactly how real world economy is (ideally) meant to work.

latexr: But the person upstream hasn’t. It’s not obvious to them. Which is why a good answer has to include the detail.

testing22321: Maybe a basic question - do miners use solar?Prices are dropping so fast it seems like the cheapest way to power mining rigs.Also free grid electricity for three hours a day in Australia will be interesting.

tgsovlerkhgsel: They generally use whatever is available and cheapest. However, due to the constant power demand and the capital cost involved (you don't want your miners sitting idle), if that isn't grid power, its often either "reliable" renewables (e.g. hydro), "stranded" fossil energy (e.g. gas that would otherwise be flared off), or in the worst case, literally buying a coal power plant that was about to shut down just to power a Bitcoin mine.

groundzeros2015: the market is made up of many goods and services. Different people want different things at different times.

phil21: It's the reverse.As price per coin goes up, more folks will find mining profitable and invest in mining operations. Difficulty goes up until it's no longer attractive for anyone to add to the global hash rate.As price per coin goes down, less of those operations are profitable and fewer new people will find it to be a good investment. Difficulty stays the same or goes down. Due to capital expenses, difficulty is more sticky in the downward direction than upwards.There is of course some marginal price action in between where there is in theory selling pressure from miners when it's less profitable to mine (to fund operational expenses and debt), but I don't think it's super material to the overall market volume these days.

groundzeros2015: But if you have anywhere near the market power to do a 50% attack, you can make a lot of money mining.

oefrha: > No one is producing Bitcoin at loss, because it doesn't make any senseIf you can’t even fathom businesses having fixed costs (e.g. fixed electricity purchase contracts, loan payback) and sometimes would continue at a loss in order to not incur larger losses, you better not comment on such topics.

pydry: They all correlate with bitcoin. Same problem probably applies.

groundzeros2015: No. all coins do not have equal mining participation.

eru: I think the comment you replied to meant that the other coins are also dropping in price, when bitcoin drops.