BitcoinMarketsBlockchain
|7 min ReadBitcoin miners face a cash-rich, cost-poor reality
Carter Hayes
Senior Analyst
Published
Jan 16, 2026
Crypto Twitter is full of doom and memes again. Some say the bull run is dead. Some say this is just another shakeout. Everybody has a theory. But there is one group in this market that does not trade in vibes or astrology. They deal in math. They feel every tremor in real time. They are the first participants in the Bitcoin chain: the miners.
They survived tariff shocks when US President Donald Trump slapped reciprocal tariffs on Asian countries that supply most of the mining hardware. They survived multiple halvings that cut their block rewards in half. Their fate is written in code. Fixed rewards. Floating costs. Brutal, simple economics.
Today, with ETFs seeing billion dollar net outflows for three straight days, funding turning, and “buy the dip” reduced to a meme, the question is not only what traders feel. The question is how the miners are actually doing.
Prathik spent the week running the numbers. Revenue in, electricity out, cash margins, and the painful accounting charges that come later. The picture that emerges is not a collapse. It is a tight, cash-positive but capital-heavy industry that looks rich on the surface and squeezed underneath.
Miners feel the squeeze before anyone else
The miners’ business model is simple. The protocol pays them in BTC. The real world bills them in dollars for power and hardware. That is it. When the market shakes, they feel it first on their income statement.
Average 7-day miners’ revenue has already dropped 35 percent, from about 40 million over the past two months. At current BTC levels below $90,000, this is not a thriving industry. It is a cornered one.
Bitcoin’s revenue engine itself is mechanical. The reward is 3.125 BTC per block. The protocol targets a block every 10 minutes. That gives roughly 144 blocks per day. In other words, around 450 BTC mined every 24 hours. Stretch that over 30 days and you get about 13,500 BTC.
At a BTC price near 1.2 billion in monthly miner revenue. It sounds tremendous. But you then spread it over a record high hashrate of 1,078 exahashes per second. Once you divide that billion dollar pie, you get about 3.6 cents of revenue per terahash per day. That tiny number is what secures a network with a market value near $1.7 trillion.
On the cost side, everything is about electricity and hardware efficiency. Modern S21-class rigs that draw about 17 joules per terahash can still make healthy cash margins if you have cheap power. If you are running older machines or paying higher power rates, every terahash can become a liability.
At today’s hash price, which reflects difficulty, BTC price, block subsidy and fees, an S19 on $0.06 power is barely breaking even on cash. One more difficulty jump, a mild drop in price, or a heatwave that pushes power rates higher, and that miner slides underwater on operating economics.
Miners know this. Traders guess. That is why their behavior is such a powerful signal.
Cash margins look strong, but the accountants tell another story
There is also a parallel market running alongside the mining dashboards. It is the prediction market on the broader future, where people bet on elections, macro events and crypto outcomes. Platforms like Polymarket sell that story of “put your money where your conviction is.”
Miners do not bet on the future in that way. Their “prediction” is whether they keep buying machines and signing power contracts. To understand how they really feel, you need to look beyond the cash line and into all-in cost.
In December 2024, CoinShares put the average cash cost of producing one BTC for listed miners around 58,500. Different miners have different deals. Location, power contracts, machine fleets, and scale all matter.
Marathon Digital (MARA), the biggest publicly listed miner, spent on average 46,324. With BTC trading about 30 percent below its peak at $86,000, their cash margins look beautiful. They can still make strong operating profits on energy alone.
But this is only half their reality.
Miners are capital intensive businesses. They have huge non-cash expenses. Depreciation on machines that age and get replaced. Impairments when hardware or holdings lose value. Stock based compensation that dilutes shareholders. Once you factor these in, the total cost of mining a single BTC can climb above $100,000.
For MARA, a back-of-the-envelope view that includes energy, hosting, depreciation and related items pushes the all-in cost above 106,000 in December 2024 is in the same ballpark.
On the surface, you still see fat cash margins, positive accounting profit in some quarters, and enough scale to tap capital markets when needed. But zoom out and you see why many miners are not rushing to dump their BTC. Some are even buying more from the market instead of selling what they mine.
Two mining worlds share one fragile break-even line
Stronger players like MARA can keep going because they have multiple levers. They run efficient fleets. They pair in-house and hosted hardware. They build ancillary businesses around their mining operations. They can raise equity or debt when the market believes in their story.
Many other miners do not have that luxury. They sit one difficulty adjustment away from the red.
In practice, two break-even worlds coexist right now.
In the first world, industrial miners run efficient rigs, tap cheap power, and keep relatively light balance sheets. For them, BTC can slide from 50,000 before daily cash flow turns negative. At current levels, they can make more than $40,000 in cash profit per BTC. Whether they report accounting profit after depreciation and stock comp is another question, and it varies by company.
In the second world, smaller or less efficient miners are already flirting with their economic break-even once you include all non-cash costs. Even if you use a conservative all-in cost band of 110,000 per BTC, many of them are below that line on an economic basis. Their cash costs are still covered, so they keep hashing. Their accounting costs are not, so the business is bleeding on paper.
This split has a direct effect on market behavior. The more miners drift into this accounting loss zone, the less eager they are to sell BTC at current prices. They would rather hold inventory, hope for higher prices, and lean on equity or credit lines in the meantime.
At around $88,000, the system looks stable, but only under one condition. The miners do not dump heavy BTC into the market. Once price falls further or they are forced to liquidate their holdings to cover bills, they inch toward their real break-even lines.
The real risk is not only price. It is access to capital. If credit tightens and equity investors lose patience, the weaker miners will not be able to roll their costs or refinance their expansion. That is when the flywheel snaps and the “cash rich, cost poor” mirage fades. At that point, survival will depend on who built real, profitable ancillary lines of business and who was only riding the cycle.
Disclaimer: This document is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. The views expressed in this document are not, and should not be taken as, investment advice or recommendations. Recipients should do their own due diligence, taking into account their specific financial circumstances, investment objectives and risk tolerance, which are not considered here, before investing. This document is not an offer, or the solicitation of an offer, to buy or sell any of the assets mentioned.