The Bitcoin Beacon
Difficulty rose 5.5% last week, the second jump in a fortnight. The machines doing the work are increasingly not in American public companies.
At block 973,728, on the afternoon of October 29, bitcoin’s mining difficulty rose 5.54% to 148.36 trillion. It had already risen 5.92% on October 16. On Monday morning mempool.space showed the network’s one-week average hashrate at 1.05 zettahashes per second — within about 6% of the record, by Real Vision analyst Jamie Coutts’s count.
That is not what the year’s biggest mining headlines predicted.
US-listed miners have spent 2026 turning their sites into data centres for artificial intelligence. IREN plans to retire about 23.2 exahashes of mining capacity by December 31. Riot signed a 20-year, 191-megawatt hosting deal at its Rockdale, Texas, campus in August. The research firm BlocksBridge says public miners’ realised hashrate fell 15% in the first half, and their disclosed AI and high-performance-computing contracts top $70 billion.
The network felt it. The 14-day average hashrate fell about 23% between October 2025 and February 2026, the steepest drop since China’s 2021 mining ban, and difficulty bottomed at 124.93 trillion in June.
Since July 17, hashrate has risen 21%, adding about 185 exahashes, Coutts says. Part is Bitdeer, whose own mining reached 82.3 exahashes in September, up from 35 a year earlier. Part is smaller operators with cheap power buying the rigs public miners retired, according to BlocksBridge. Hashrate Index data show first-quarter growth of 129% in Ethiopia, 54% in Paraguay and 28% in Oman.
The hashrate didn’t leave with the listed miners. It changed owners and, often, countries.
More machines chasing the same 3.125 bitcoin per block means less each. Hashprice — expected revenue per petahash per day — was $33.14 last week, down from $36.09 a week earlier, per Hashrate Index, and the lowest since August. CryptoSlate estimates the two October adjustments cut expected earnings for the same machines by about 10.5%. A 25 J/TH machine paying 6 cents per kilowatt-hour now loses about $3.32 per petahash a day on power alone; it breaks even near 5.45 cents.
The next adjustment is due around November 12. Early estimates range from 0.4% higher to 3.7% lower.
Country growth figures are Hashrate Index’s year-over-year first-quarter estimates as cited by BeInCrypto. Machine economics are CryptoSlate’s illustration, before pool fees beyond 2%, hosting or other costs.
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