The 2036 Issue: Bitcoin Mining Is Dead, Long Live the Miners!

A notable development has hit the crypto markets. Bitcoin Magazine The 2036 Issue: Bitcoin Mining Is Dead, Long Live the Miners! As I write this, Bitcoin is coming off of conceivably its worst week ever. It started out with the January 31, 2026 release of batch number two of the Epstein files, which implicated none-too-few Bitcoiners and early stage Bitcoin companies (I wonder, will we still be talking about Epstein in 2036?

The release now reads like a nasty omen. Because on Thursday of the same week, bitcoin suffered its fourth worst drawdown ever, a 21% bludgeoning that bled $16,000 from its price as it went from $76,000 to $60,000 in a single day. This was gnarly for bitcoin holders, of course, but it was gnarlier still for Bitcoin miners, who were already suffering under historically low revenue compression.

Market Dynamics

Bitcoin hashprice – a measure of mining revenue in either USD or BTC per unit of hashrate – hit an all-time low of $28. 90/PH/day, according to Bitcoin mining data platform Hashrate Index. This means that 1 petahash of hashrate (roughly five new generation ASIC miners) would net you a paltry 28 dollars and 90 cents.

A bum can make a better daily wage panhandling. It’s no surprise, then, that Bitcoin’s difficulty experienced 6 negative difficulty adjustments (out of 7 total) in three months between November 12, 2025 and February 7, 2026 (and the only positive adjustment was 0. 04% on Christmas Eve).

The last time we had a string of adjustments like that? 2011, y’all – when early tinkerers were mining with the computing power equivalent of a toaster compared to modern ASIC miners. Now, bitcoin’s anemic price isn’t the only factor weighing on difficulty.

Market Impact

Bitcoin miners are also pivoting to AI, and they are starting to decommission their ASIC fleets to make room for The Next Big Thing. But the economic stress miners are facing right now offers a decent glimpse into the future of an industry whose underlying commodity trades in backwardation on a long enough timeframe. Put another way, hashprice is trending to zero, so what does that mean for Bitcoin?

But also, nothing bad, either. For sale, blockspace. Before we prognosticate, let’s examine where the Bitcoin mining industry is now.

I said earlier that hashprice is trending to zero. This is due to a combination of Moore’s law – as semiconductors improve, so too does the energy efficiency of ASIC miners, meaning miners can produce more hashrate with fewer electrons, which puts pressure on Bitcoin’s difficulty and reduces the rate of mining rewards per unit of hashrate – and the Halving. The block subsidy will eventually hit zero.

Crypto markets are watching this development closely as investors weigh its potential impact on prices.