The math is already stacked against Bitcoin miners, and the war is making it worse every week.
Checkonchain’s difficulty regression model estimates the average cost of production based on network difficulty and energy input, which as of March 13 was $88,000 per Bitcoin.
As of Sunday morning, Bitcoin was trading at $69,200, a spread of nearly $19,000 per coin, meaning miners on average lose 21% per block they produce.
The cost squeeze has been intensifying since October’s Bitcoin crash, which sent the price of Bitcoin from $126,000 to below $70,000, but the war in Iran has accelerated the trend. Oil above $100 will have a direct impact on the cost of electricity for mining operations, especially as an estimated 8-10% of global computing power operates in an energy market that is sensitive to Middle Eastern supply.
The Strait of Hormuz handles about 20% of global oil and gas flows but remains effectively closed to most commercial traffic. Trump’s 48-hour ultimatum on Saturday threatened to attack Iranian power plants, creating new risks for miners.
The network is already showing stress. On Saturday, difficulty fell 7.76% to 133.79 trillion, marking the second-largest negative adjustment in 2026 after an 11.16% plunge during February’s Winter Storm Fern. The current difficulty is nearly 10% lower than at the beginning of the year, and far lower than the historical high of nearly $155 trillion in November 2025.
Hashrate has dropped back to approximately 920 EH/s, well below the record 1 Zetahash level reached in 2025. The average block time in the previous period extended to 12 minutes and 36 seconds, well above the 10-minute target.
Hash prices, a metric that tracks miners’ expected earnings per unit of computing power, are currently hovering around $33.30 per petahash per day, according to Luxor’s Hashrate Index. That’s close to the break-even point for most hardware, and not far from the all-time low of $28 hit on February 23.
When miners are unable to cover costs, they sell Bitcoin to fund operations. This sell-off added to supply pressure in a market that was already facing a loss of 43% of total supply, with whales distributing on the rally and leveraged positions dominating price action. Mining Economics is more than just an industry 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 revenue than mining Bitcoin at a loss. Companies such as Marathon Digital, Cipher Mining and others have been building data center capacity alongside mining operations.
The next difficulty adjustment is expected in early April, and further drops are expected according to CoinWarz data. If Bitcoin prices remain below $88,000 and show no signs of returning to that level in the short term, the exodus of miners will continue and the difficulty will continue to decline.
The network is self-correcting by design, making it cheaper to mine when participants leave. But the period between costs exceeding revenue and difficulty adjusting low enough to restore profitability takes a toll on both miners and the spot market that absorbs their forced selling.
