Bitcoin Mining Capitulates: The 11% Drop Since 2021

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Markets

What to know:

  • Bitcoin‘s mining difficulty dropped 11%, the biggest dive since China’s 2021 reshuffle, thanks to a perfect storm of plummeting prices and a US winter that pretended to be a particularly moody weather forecaster.
  • Miners are getting battered: hashprice is halved to about $35 per petahash from a peak near $70, basically a haircut for the block-loving crowd.
  • The drop reads as a self-correcting nudge: for the survivors, it could boost profitability and may hint at a market capitulation phase-cheerful vibes for the few, nightmare fuel for the rest.

Bitcoin’s mining difficulty shrank by around 11%, the largest fall since China’s 2021 crackdown, following a sharp drop in hashrate driven by plunging prices and winter storm outages across the U.S.-because nothing says ‘hang in there’ like a weather apocalypse and a crypto slump.

Mining difficulty, which decides how hard it is to unearth new Bitcoin blocks, tweaks roughly every two weeks to keep those blocks arriving on a 10-minute cadence-yes, the network wants punctuality and it is judgmental about it.

The latest move pushed the metric from just over 141.6 trillion down to about 125.86 trillion, per Blockchain.com, signalling a conspicuous drop in the number of active machines kept warm by electricity and questionable optimism.

The decline follows a string of blows to miners. Bitcoin prices have tumbled from an all-time high of about $126,000 in October to around $69,500-proof that market high-waters can drown even the most enthusiastic ASICs.

That price slide forced many miners, especially those with ancient rigs and high energy costs, to shut down. Some also pivoted their hardware toward artificial intelligence (AI), because megacap firms offer contracts so stable they make your cash flow feel like a spa day.

Bitfarms (BITF) notably saw its share price surge after declaring it’s no longer a bitcoin company, instead focusing on data center development for high-performance computing and AI workloads-talk about a dramatic pivot, darling.

Bitcoin mining revenue per terahash, tracked as the hashprice, has slashed from nearly $70 at the peak to a little over $35 today-a haircut that even a barber would raise an eyebrow at.

Severe winter storms, especially in Texas, compounded the mess. Grid operators issued curtailment requests to conserve electricity for homes, and public mining firms scaled back production, with some days seeing bitcoin output fall by more than 60%.

While a drop in difficulty might look alarming, it functions as a self-correcting mechanism. For those who remain online, reduced competition can boost profitability and help keep the business model afloat-like a survivalist group hug, but with more math and less camping.

Historically, major difficulty drops have signalled capitulation, often preceding stabilization or a rebound in price as miners sell the BTC they mine to cover operating expenses. In other words, the soap opera continues, with hashpower as the star and the balance sheet as the supporting cast.

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2026-02-09 14:19