BTC Miners Face the Toughest Profitability Conditions on Record

According to new data from Miner Weekly, the bitcoin mining industry has entered the harshest profitability phase in its history. A sharp November correction pushed hashprice below $35 per petahash per second, dropping beneath the median total hashcost for all major public miners.

The Q3 average hashprice hovered near $55/PH/s, but the latest decline has turned profitability stress into what analysts describe as a systemic challenge. TheMinerMag’s review shows that the median total hashcost—covering cash fleet opex, corporate overhead and financial expenses—now stands around $44/PH/s.

“Bitcoin mining has entered what is effectively the harshest margin environment of all time,” Miner Weekly wrote, noting that even highly efficient operators are now running at or near break-even.

Rising difficulty, falling revenue

The bitcoin network hashrate recently crossed 1.1 ZH/s, setting a new record. With competition climbing and revenue per unit of compute falling, cost-per-BTC becomes a less reliable metric, prompting analysts to focus on cost-per-hash as the primary measure of miner resilience.

The downturn has also stretched machine payback periods to more than 1,200 days, well beyond the ~850-day countdown to the next halving—further pressuring capex-heavy operators.

Miners shift to deleveraging and liquidity preservation

Balance sheets are tightening across the sector. CleanSpark recently repaid its Coinbase bitcoin-backed credit line shortly after raising over $1 billion in convertibles—an early sign of a broader shift toward reducing leverage in response to collapsing margins.

Q3 funding trends highlight the same picture: public miners raised approximately $3.5 billion in debt (mostly near-zero coupon convertibles) and another $1.4 billion via equity. Entering Q4, financing conditions have tightened sharply, with firms increasingly relying on senior secured notes at ~7%. Cipher and Terawulf alone secured nearly $5 billion in new debt, putting Q4 on track to become the largest debt-raising quarter in mining history.

Can AI and HPC offset the downturn?

Many miners are attempting to diversify revenue through high-performance computing (HPC) and AI hosting. Early results show growth, but not yet at the scale required to counteract collapsing hashprice and rising financial burdens.

For now, the sector is entering what analysts describe as a sorting phase: operators with stronger balance sheets, competitive power contracts and diversified revenue will have a clear advantage as weaker miners approach extended periods of negative margins.