Bitcoin mining difficulty has now remained below its all-time high for longer than at any point in the asset’s history.
ByJordan Lyanchev
Bitcoin’s mining industry is showing unusual weakness, even as the network remains highly valuable.
With the difficulty metric still below its October 2025 record more than a year later, the focus has shifted to whether miners face a temporary downturn or whether capital and electricity are permanently migrating elsewhere.
Unwanted Record Hit
According to on-chain data, the Bitcoin mining difficulty
According to on-chain data, the Bitcoin mining difficulty reached an all-time high of almost 156 trillion on October 29, 2025. As of press time, it stood at just over 148 trillion, which is still 5% below that peak and hasn’t been able to break it ever since. This means that the current period without a new difficulty record has now exceeded the previous longest stretch, which lasted roughly 364 days between August 2011 and July 2012.
Back then, Bitcoin’s price collapsed by roughly 94%-95%, while another exceptionally long difficulty downturn in 2021 followed China’s sweeping ban on domestic crypto mining, which forced a substantial portion of global hash rate to relocate. Saifedean Ammous, author of The Bitcoin Standard, noted that the current slowdown has happened without anything remotely comparable.
In an update on mining, which he reshared now, he noted that the current period has become the longest in Bitcoin’s history. His explanation, though, is structural.
In part, he blamed it on Bitcoin’s pre-programmed
In part, he blamed it on Bitcoin’s pre-programmed halvings. Since the block subsidy drops by 50% roughly every four years, BTC’s price must increase fast enough to compensate miners for the reduction. He estimated that mining economics require the cryptocurrency’s value to appreciate by almost 19% annually over four years, before accounting for dollar devaluation and the growing opportunity cost created by AI infrastructure.
If expected returns are below that threshold, allocating more capital and electricity toward mining becomes progressively less attractive.
