Even the China Ban Wasn’t This Bad

Bitcoin mining difficulty has now remained below its all-time high for longer than at any point in the asset’s history.

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 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 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.

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More Lucrative Alternative

Ammous argued that Bitcoin miners no longer have the same monopoly over cheap power and data-center infrastructure they once enjoyed. AI companies are competing aggressively for precisely those resources, potentially offering miners a more profitable use for their facilities.

Core Scientific is a prime example, as the company recently said it plans to fully exit the Bitcoin mining space by the end of the year and enter 2027 as a dedicated AI and high-performance computing colocation provider. It has already reduced its mining fleet by almost half as it redirects electricity and data-center capacity toward infrastructure customers.

The financial incentive is clear: colocation revenue jumped 58% QoQ to $215.4 million in the third quarter, up from $15 million a year earlier.

However, Ammous doesn’t think this is necessarily bearish for BTC. In fact, he noted that if mining becomes less attractive than simply holding BTC, capital that might have gone toward machines, facilities, and electricity could instead flow directly into Bitcoin. He also expects declining electricity consumption to weaken one of the asset’s most persistent criticisms, and that of the network behind it.