I just noticed that Bitcoin miners are in a pretty tough situation right now. Production costs are around $88,000 per coin, but BTC is trading at $73,940 — meaning each mined block is generating an average loss of about 16%. This is quite different from a few months ago when margins were positive.

Difficulty dropped 7.76% last weekend, reaching 133.79 trillion — the second-largest negative adjustment of the year. Hashrate has fallen back to about 920 EH/s, well below the record high. Block times are extending to 12 minutes and 36 seconds, when ideally they should be 10 minutes. All of this points to miners exiting the network.

The problem isn't just the falling BTC price since October. The geopolitical situation in the Middle East, with oil above $100 and the Strait of Hormuz effectively closed, is driving up electricity costs, especially for operations sensitive to energy supply in that region. It's estimated that 8-10% of the global hashrate operates in these areas.

The hashprice is around $33.30 per petahash per second per day, nearly at breakeven and dangerously close to the all-time low of $28. When they can't cover costs, miners sell Bitcoin to fund operations. This forced exodus adds more supply pressure to a market that already has 43% of its supply accumulating losses.

Interestingly, large miners are diversifying into AI and high-performance computing to achieve more predictable revenues. Marathon Digital, Cipher Mining, and others are expanding data centers in parallel. But this also means more Bitcoin sales to finance these operations.

The next difficulty adjustment is at the beginning of April and is expected to decrease even further. If BTC stays below $88,000, this miner exodus will continue to accelerate. The network self-adjusts, making mining cheaper as miners exit, but the period when costs surpass revenue and difficulty drops enough is where the damage happens — both for miners and for the market that absorbs their forced sales. This exodus dynamic is creating a structural pressure quite different from what we've been seeing.