Bitcoin's mining difficulty rose 5.54% on Oct. 29 as returning computing power increased competition among miners. Revenue per unit of computing power has fallen to its lowest level since August, and older equipment struggles to cover power costs.
Bitcoin's mining difficulty jumped 5.54% on Oct. 29, leaving miners who already faced shrinking revenues with tougher competition. Nodewitness data shows the adjustment lifted difficulty from 140.58 trillion to 148.36 trillion, after a 5.92% increase on Oct. 16.
Miners rebuild network hashrate despite the AI shift
The increase follows a recovery in the network's hashrate. According to Real Vision chief crypto analyst Jamie Coutts, the 14-day average hashrate declined 23% between its October 2025 peak and February 2026, the steepest drop since China's mining ban in 2021.
Since July 17, however, the trend has reversed. Coutts's analysis shows hashrate climbed 21% over 102 days, adding approximately 185 exahashes per second and returning to within 6% of its previous record. Look Into Bitcoin data also shows computing power at its highest level in seven months.
The rebound stands out because several publicly traded miners have shifted their business models toward high-performance computing and AI data centers. Bitcoin adjusts difficulty every 2,016 blocks, roughly two weeks, to hold average block production time at 10 minutes. The return of computing power helps explain the latest increases.
Hashprice drops to its weakest since August
Higher difficulty means each miner must do more work to earn the same expected amount of BTC. The latest adjustment alone cuts expected earnings per unit of unchanged computing power by approximately 5.24%, and the two October adjustments together reduce it by approximately 10.5%.
Startmining data shows hashprice, the expected daily revenue per petahash per second, has dropped to approximately $33 per PH/s per day, its weakest level since August. It averaged $40 in September.
The pressure falls hardest on older machines. At a gross hashprice of $33.35 and an electricity tariff of 6 cents per kilowatt-hour, equipment running at 25 joules per terahash faces a daily power bill of $36, a $3.32 shortfall before other costs. Equipment rated at 20 J/TH spends $28.80 under the same conditions and keeps a modest surplus.
Added machines strengthen the network, but they also raise competition for the available block rewards, which squeezes the revenue behind those investments.
Source: CryptoSlate
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