Let’s note that the current situation is challenging for miners first of all because of the record complexity, the growth of which reduces the profitability of each BTC mining device. On top of that, the weakened BTC exchange rate is affecting, because of which equipment owners get smaller income in dollar equivalent.

ASIC cryptocurrency miner

The profitability of miners is also affected by the rising cost of electricity. As a result, because of all this, some coin mining giants are on the verge of bankruptcy. Read more about the current conditions in a separate article.

What will happen to Bitcoin mining

Miners are “surrounded” by negative indicators. Among them are BTC price drop, rising electricity costs due to inflation and increase in hash rate. The latter has a direct impact on the complexity of mining: the higher the hash rate, the greater the resulting complexity, which thus guarantees the creation of blocks in an average of ten minutes. And the higher the complexity, the fewer coins a miner can mine with a unit of his equipment, which is usually measured in terraches.

Hashrate and complexity

During prolonged bearish trends, the cost of mining Bitcoin exceeds its price. This reduces miners’ profits and forces the most inefficient of them to shut down unprofitable equipment. Miners are also forced to sell more and more of their mined BTC, and may end up having to liquidate their holdings more actively.

Historic Bitcoin collapses

Analysts at the Glassnode platform have published an indicator showing the BTC price and the cryptocurrency’s hash rate below in two bars. The lower blue bar shows the 1-year moving average of the hashrate, while the upper green bar shows the 1-year moving average of the hashrate plus two standard deviations.

Hashrate fluctuations

Note how hashrate fluctuates between the lower and upper bands in the long run.

One phenomenon of the 2022 bearish trend is that the hashrate did not decrease significantly towards the lower band, meaning that not only were miners not unplugged during the “crypto-zima”, but they were building up their capacity. The exception is the short-term collapse in the chart, which shows the migration of miners in May-July 2021 following China’s mining ban.

According to CryptoSlate sources, this steady increase in hash rates is likely a result of delays in the production and supply chain of next-generation ASIC miner chips in 2021. These devices were procured as early as last year, but arrived to customers relatively recently and were included in the network in the middle of a bearish trend.

How much does it take to mine cryptocurrencies?

Compared to November 2021, when Bitcoin’s price reached its all-time high, the cryptocurrency’s hash rate has increased by about 68 percent. In other words, since November 2021, miners are getting less reward in bitcoins. Over the same period, the price of BTC has fallen by 76.9 percent, which is already a lower reward also in dollars.

Changes in complexity

For more clarity, Glassnode analysts have published another chart that calculates miners’ income per exahesh of their equipment capacity.

Mining profitability per 1 exahesh

Bitcoin miners are currently experiencing a 41 per cent drop in profit compared to the same period last year – as indicated by the Pewell multiplier indicator.

Decline in miners’ profits

As the complexity of mining increases, so does the cost of mining BTC. The indicator below shows the correlation between complexity and capitalization to estimate the average cost of mining one bitcoin.

Mining cost as a function of complexity

According to this metric, it costs miners an average of $17,008 to get 1 BTC, which is more than 7 percent higher than the current market price of the cryptocurrency. It should be noted that Bitcoin’s market price has already fallen even below its mining costs in previous bearish cycles, with miners often mining at a loss for months on end. The current trend looks set to be no exception.


We believe that eventually some large Bitcoin miners will still be forced to capitulate. First of all, this will be facilitated by the record complexity, which currently prevents many miners from mining in the black. On top of that, the difficult energy situation is having an impact, well, electricity is traditionally the main expense item for the owners of computing equipment. So the further BTC is valued at current 15-16 thousand dollars, the more likely new problems for ASIC-miner holders.