Difficulty Posts Its Longest Streak of Upward Adjustments on Record
Hashrate keeps arriving despite compressed margins, which the data desk reads as a hardware efficiency story rather than a price bet.
Network difficulty has adjusted upward in every epoch of the current run, the longest consecutive streak since the metric has been tracked, even as revenue per unit of hashrate sits near multi-year lows.
The apparent contradiction resolves at the machine level. Newer hardware produces substantially more hashrate per watt, so a fleet replacing older units raises network difficulty while lowering its own energy bill.
Our estimates suggest the majority of hashrate added over the past two quarters is replacement rather than expansion, which implies less new power demand than the difficulty chart alone would suggest.
The read-through for older fleets is harsh: every efficiency-driven difficulty increase pushes the marginal machine further underwater without any change in price.
- difficulty
- hashrate
- mining economics
- data
About the author
Alistair Kwan — Alistair Kwan runs MyBunnyFarm's data desk, building the datasets behind the newsroom's charts and stress-testing the numbers other people publish. He writes the methodology notes attached to our analytical pieces and holds a master's in statistics.
Data Editor · London, United Kingdom · More from Alistair Kwan
Corrections to this report: corrections desk. Nothing in this article is investment advice.