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Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC) miners are the most committed crypto believers as they stake their entire businesses on the idea that Bitcoin is worth producing. Right now, it is costing them more to mine a single coin than that BTC is worth. According to CoinShares’ Q1 2026 mining report, the average publicly listed miner spent roughly $80,000 to produce one BTC last quarter, and Bitcoin is trading around $67,000.
Instead of holding on and waiting for the Bitcoin price to recover, miners are doing something that tells you a lot about where they think things are heading. They are signing billions in AI contracts, selling Bitcoin from their own treasuries, and in some cases publicly declaring that they are no longer Bitcoin companies. If the people producing Bitcoin are walking away from it, what’s going to be the impact on the Bitcoin price?
Why Does It Cost $80,000 to Mine One Bitcoin?
The biggest reason Bitcoin mining costs have gotten this high is the April 2024 halving, which cut the block reward from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC. Miners now earn half the Bitcoin for the same amount of electricity and computing power, which effectively doubles the cost to produce each coin overnight—and then the macro environment makes it worse.
Electricity makes up roughly 75-85% of a miner’s total expenses, and the Iran war has pushed oil above $100 for the first time since 2022. The Strait of Hormuz, which handles around 20% of the world’s oil and gas flows, has been disrupted by the conflict, and that has driven up energy costs across global supply chains. Miners who were already operating on thin margins after the halving are now paying significantly more for the one input they cannot reduce without shutting rigs off entirely.
You can see the impact on the Bitcoin network itself. Mining difficulty has dropped three times in a row, which is the first streak of consecutive negative adjustments since July 2022. The hashrate has fallen from a peak of 1,160 EH/s to roughly 920 EH/s as unprofitable operations shut down. Average block times have stretched to over 12 minutes, well above the 10-minute target.
When mining difficulty drops like this, it means more miners are leaving the network than new ones are joining, and the ones leaving are doing so because they are losing money on every block they mine.
What Are Bitcoin Miners Doing About It?
Rather than waiting for Bitcoin to recover above their breakeven, publicly listed miners have signed over $70 billion in AI and high-performance computing contracts that use the same power infrastructure they built for mining. Core Scientific locked in a $10.2 billion, 12-year deal with CoreWeave, and Hut 8 signed a $7 billion AI data center lease at its River Bend campus.
CoinShares estimates that listed miners could derive 70% of their revenue from AI by the end of 2026, up from around 30% today. Wall Street is rewarding the pivot clearly—miners with secured AI contracts now trade at 12.3x forward sales, more than double the 5.9x multiple for miners still focused purely on Bitcoin. The market is telling these companies their infrastructure is worth more running AI than mining BTC.
To fund the transition, miners are selling their Bitcoin. And they are not just the coins they mine each day, but the reserves they have been building for years. Publicly listed miners have collectively sold over 15,000 BTC from peak treasury holdings. Bitdeer reduced its treasury to zero in February, while Riot Platforms sold 1,818 BTC worth $162 million in December. Even Marathon, the largest public holder at 53,822 BTC, also expanded its policy in March to authorise selling from its entire balance sheet reserve.
Bitfarms CEO Ben Gagnon also stated that they are no longer a Bitcoin company. When the companies that secure the Bitcoin network are liquidating their own holdings to fund a completely different business, that creates a type of selling pressure that goes well beyond normal miner activity.
What Does the Mining Crisis Mean for the Bitcoin Price?
If you are holding Bitcoin right now, the miner crisis is adding more selling pressure on top of an already weak market. Miners dumping freshly mined coins at a loss and liquidating treasuries to fund AI transitions means more supply hitting exchanges while demand is already thin. CoinShares expects further capitulation if Bitcoin stays below $80,000, and the next difficulty adjustment in early April is projected to decline again.
Bitcoin’s mining difficulty has already started self-correcting with three consecutive drops, though, and the same pattern has historically marked the tail end of mining capitulations. Every previous cycle where miners were flushed out at a loss has ended the same way. The weakest operators left, costs dropped for the survivors, the selling pressure eases, and the Bitcoin price eventually recovered. What matters now is the Bitcoin price holding the $66,000 support before the recovery happens.