The mining industry continues to struggle and grapple with numerous adversities, including high IT costs, fears of a trade war, and electricity problems.
The Bitcoin mining hash price, or in other words, a miner’s daily return per unit of hash power spent mining blocks, has remained constant at around $48 per petahash per second (PH/s), despite a slight 1.4% increase in Bitcoin difficulty.
Data from CoinWarz shows that Bitcoin difficulty increased to 113.76 trillion at block 889,081 on March 23, up from 112.1 trillion in the previous epoch.
According to TheMinerMag, a hash price below $50 poses a financial burden for miners using older hardware such as the Antminer S19 XP and S19 Pro.
The older hardware, combined with declining network transaction fees, risks making some miners unprofitable and forcing them to shut down their hardware until they upgrade their application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) or network conditions change.
Mining firms have been struggling since the Bitcoin halving in April 2024, which reduced the block reward to 3.125 BTC per mined block, the general increase in network difficulty, and the recent downturn in crypto markets due to macroeconomic uncertainties.
Miners face a difficult start to 2025
Research by financial services firm JPMorgan shows that publicly traded Bitcoin mining companies lost a total of 22% of their share value in February 2025.
Even mining companies that have expanded their operations to include artificial intelligence and high-performance data centers to offset lost revenue from mining are under financial pressure, according to the JPMorgan report.
The financial services firm pointed to the release of DeepSeek R1—an open-source AI model trained at a fraction of the cost of leading models while delivering the same performance as closed-source alternatives—which is putting a strain on large AI data centers.
A steadily increasing network hashrate, the sum of computing power in the Bitcoin network, also leads to increased competition among miners, who must expend more computing power to remain profitable.
Fears of a trade war between the United States and Canada, as well as constant reports of tariffs, have unsettled miners.
Threats by Canadian authorities to impose tariffs on energy exports to the United States are further increasing the pressure on the already struggling industry.
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