Bitcoin Mining Pay Jumped 22%. Miners Still Aren’t Expanding.

Bitcoin mining just got more profitable, and miners responded by doing almost nothing. At block 965,664 the network’s difficulty rose 1.31% to 127.45 trillion — its eighth increase of the year — while hashprice, the revenue a miner earns per unit of computing power, jumped more than 22%, from about $32.42 to $39.63 per petahash per day.

That leap tracks bitcoin’s price, not a change in the machines. And the machines are the tell: hashrate, the total computing power securing the network, stalled near 934 exahashes per second, well short of the one-zettahash mark the industry has circled all year. A fatter margin did not summon more rigs.

Tapped out, not tapping out

The stall is less a retreat than a ceiling. Miners are not unplugging en masse; they simply are not expanding, held back by the supply of new hardware, the cost of power, and a caution born of thin post-halving economics. Building capacity takes machines and megawatts that are not sitting idle waiting to be switched on.

A second force pulls the other way. The most profitable use of a data center’s power this year has often been artificial-intelligence hosting rather than bitcoin, and several large miners have redirected capacity accordingly. The result is a network whose security budget is expanding through price rather than through raw growth in hashing.

Difficulty, which adjusts roughly every two weeks to keep blocks arriving about every ten minutes, has now risen in eight of the year’s retargets — a slow grind upward that reflects steady, not surging, participation.

Security on a single lever

Fees tell the rest of the story. Over the last 24 hours, transaction fees made up only about 0.43% of miner revenue; the block subsidy is the rest. With fees this thin, miners’ income — and therefore the cost of attacking the network — rides almost entirely on the dollar price of bitcoin.

“More profitable” and “more secure” have quietly stopped meaning the same thing.

That is stable for now, with hashrate holding and difficulty ticking up. But it concentrates a great deal of the network’s health on one variable. In a market where the price is soft and new rigs are scarce, a jump in mining pay no longer automatically buys more of the hashing that protects the chain.

Why it matters: with fees a rounding error, bitcoin’s security spend now tracks its price far more than its transaction demand — a dependence worth watching as miners chase AI money.

Network figures read from mempool.space and cited reporting on September 7, 2026. Informational only — not financial advice.