- The good unplug
- The place are they going?
In response to new on-chain information, the Bitcoin community is experiencing a sustained interval of “miner capitulation” with a constant drop in mining problem since November 2025.
Within the meantime, profitability is stagnant, and operators are unplugging their machines en masse.
The good unplug
The Bitcoin problem chart paints a stark image of the exodus. Issue hit an all-time excessive of practically 155 T in early November 2025. Since that peak, the metric has stepped down persistently, crashing to its present degree of 141.67 T as of late January 2026.
Mining problem determines how laborious it ought to be to discover a block. When extra miners be a part of, it will get more durable. After they depart, it will get simpler. The stepped decline within the chart confirms that huge quantities of hashrate are being taken offline. Miners are “tapping out” since they’re unable to justify the electrical energy prices of working their fleets.
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In late October, miner profitability (hashprice) fell off a cliff. It dropped from ~$49/PH/s to ~$35/PH/s in a matter of days.
Regardless of the issue dropping, which ought to theoretically make it extra worthwhile for the remaining miners, profitability has barely budged. It stays caught within the $38–$40 vary.
This creates a “profitability lure.” The remaining miners are getting a bigger slice of the pie, however the worth of that pie is probably going too low to make a distinction.
The place are they going?
Miners are “switching to other forms of enterprise.” As a consequence of high-performance computing (HPC) contracts paying considerably greater than Bitcoin mining, many services are repurposing their energy infrastructure to host AI information facilities.
For a lot of, the selection is straightforward: mine Bitcoin at a loss, or lease the facility capability to AI companies for assured revenue.