Miners' revenue per unit of computing power rises 10%, still 40% below October 2025
Our numbers show miners now earn more bitcoin for the same computing power than at last year's price peak. The squeeze comes from the dollar price.
The 9.13% difficulty cut on November 14 raised what miners earn for each unit of computing power by about 10%. By our calculation, a miner now earns about $31.62 a day for each petahash per second of computing power. Just before the cut, at the same price and fees, it was $28.74.
That is still about 40% below the $52.58 we calculate for October 6, 2025, the day bitcoin set its record high on Bitstamp. Yet in bitcoin terms, miners now earn more per unit of computing power than they did that day. The dollar price explains almost all of the drop.
How we worked it out
Miners call this figure hashprice: what one petahash per second (PH/s) of mining power earns in a day. One PH/s is a quadrillion guesses a second.
We start with the average reward per block, which is the 3.125 BTC subsidy (new coins per block) plus fees. We multiply it by 144 blocks a day. We divide that by the network's computing power implied by the difficulty (difficulty × 2 to the power of 32 ÷ 600 seconds). We then convert to dollars at Bitstamp's price.
For today's figure we used the average reward over the last 144 blocks, 975,647 to 975,790, from mempool.space: 3.1543 BTC per block. We used Bitstamp's price of $67,188 at 12:04 UTC on November 14. For past dates we used mempool.space's daily average reward per block, the difficulty in force that day and Bitstamp's daily close.
Because difficulty sits in the bottom of the fraction, a 9.13% cut lifts hashprice by 1 ÷ (1 − 0.0913), or about 10.05%. Our figures went from 42,769 to 47,065 satoshis (sats, each one hundred-millionth of a bitcoin) per PH/s per day. Those two figures use today's price and fees, so they isolate the effect of the cut. The dated figures below use each day's close and that day's average reward.
Where it stands
- April 18, 2024, the day before the last halving: $103.47 (162,901 sats)
- October 6, 2025, bitcoin's record high: $52.58 (42,155 sats)
- January 1, 2026: $37.80 (42,603 sats)
- June 30, 2026, this year's low: $27.72 (47,368 sats)
- November 13, 2026, the day before the cut: $29.21 (42,819 sats)
- November 14, 2026, after the cut: $31.62 (47,065 sats)
The halving in April 2024 cut the block subsidy in half, which roughly halved the bitcoin figure, to about 80,000 sats. Rising difficulty has pushed it lower since. Measured in sats, today's figure is about 12% above October 6, 2025, because difficulty is now lower than it was then.
In dollars, the picture is worse. Bitcoin's Bitstamp close on October 6, 2025, was $124,728. At $67,188, the price is about 46% lower. That fall outweighs the gain from easier mining.
Fees barely helped in the last day. Over the last 144 blocks, fees were 4.22 BTC out of 454.22 BTC in total rewards, under 1%, mempool.space data shows. Almost all of a miner's income is the fixed subsidy, so the price matters most.
Why computing power left
Blocks slowed because computing power left the network, mempool.space data shows. The data cannot show why. Falling margins, miners cutting power use and moves to AI work are all possible. Difficulty is now 13.6% below its record of 155.97 trillion, set on October 29, 2025, according to mempool.space.
Some large miners are shifting toward AI. Blockhead reviewed third-quarter results from nine large listed miners. At three of them, mining was no longer the main source of revenue. Some sell coins to fund the shift, Blockhead found. MARA sold 13,597 bitcoin after September to repay loans, as Orange Wire reported on November 9.
The case that it means less
The boost is mechanical and can fade within two weeks. If the price keeps falling, the dollar gain disappears. If switched-off machines come back on, difficulty rises at the next reset and takes the gain back.
Hashprice is also a network average. A miner with cheap power and new machines can profit at levels that put an older operation out of business. We do not have reliable cost data for individual miners, so we make no claim about who is above or below breakeven.
What to watch
- The next reset at block 977,760. At 12:04 UTC on November 14, mempool.space estimated another cut of about 5.8% around November 29. That estimate is early and will move.
- Miners' monthly production reports in early December, which show how much bitcoin they mined, sold and kept.
- Our Mining page, which shows hashprice live from mempool.space data.
Analysis by Orange Wire. It explains the data and is not financial advice.
Miners secure bitcoin, and they pay their bills in dollars. When their pay per machine falls, the weakest switch off, blocks slow down and difficulty adjusts, as it did this week. Watching hashprice helps you understand why miners sell coins or change course, without guessing at their finances.
- mempool.space: Difficulty adjustments (API)
- mempool.space: Block rewards, last 144 blocks (API)
- mempool.space: Average block rewards history (API)
- mempool.space: Next difficulty adjustment estimate (API)
- Bitstamp: BTC/USD daily OHLC data
- Orange Wire Charts: bitcoin price history and all-time high
- Orange Wire: Mining
- Orange Wire: MARA sold 13,597 bitcoin after September to repay $750 million in loans
Not financial advice. How we report and check stories.
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