#Gate广场四月发帖挑战

Miners are shifting to AI and reshaping the mining industry, but this is more like a “market clearing” of computing resources rather than a “fatal crisis” for Bitcoin network security. Short-term fluctuations in computing power are a fact, but in the long run, the network achieves self-balancing through difficulty adjustments.

Hash Rate Security: Short-term Fluctuations, Long-term Resilience

The structural changes you’re worried about are reflected more in “miner identity” than in the protocol’s underlying layer.

Short-term pain: Top mining firms (such as Core Scientific) prioritize cheap electricity for AI, causing the network’s total hash rate to fall from a peak of about 1160 EH/s to around 920 EH/s, and difficulty also decreases. This does lower the attack threshold in the short term.

Long-term immunity: Bitcoin’s difficulty adjustment mechanism (DAA) is the ultimate line of defense. When hash rate loss makes block production slower, difficulty automatically drops, allowing the remaining miners’ earnings to recover and re-attracting computing power back into the network. As long as the coin price doesn’t go to zero, the security budget won’t run out.

The real change is in the composition of “security providers”: moving away from reliance on large publicly listed mining companies, back toward being led by survivors with the lowest costs (typically stranded power or marginal energy), which may actually enhance the network’s decentralization.

Revenue model: From “gamblers” to “landlords”

The mining industry is undergoing a brutal reconstruction of its balance sheets.

Accounting reality crushes everything: at the current coin price of around $70,000, mining one coin costs about $17,000–$19,000 (cost about $80,000). By comparison, AI hosting generates 3–8 times the revenue per megawatt as mining, and provides stable fiat cash flow.

Behavioral logic undergoes a qualitative change: miners are no longer stubbornly hoarding coins, but are selling BTC to fund AI transformation. Giants like Riot and Core Scientific have recently sold more than 19,000 BTC—exactly to raise capital expenditures for data center retrofits. They are shifting from “coin price believers” to “computing power infrastructure landlords.”

Market impact: Selling pressure and the transfer of pricing power

For the BTC market, this means two things:

Short-term selling pressure: During the transition period, mining companies are forced to become market sellers, continuously putting downward pressure on the coin price.

Transfer of pricing power: The pricing power of BTC is moving away from miners and fully handing over to institutional funds such as spot ETFs. In the future, coin price fluctuations will depend more on macro liquidity and institutional allocations, rather than miners’ mining costs.