Bitcoin has traded below the estimated cost of mining it for five straight months, leaving about one in five miners unprofitable and pushing listed operators to sell a record number of coins, according to JPMorgan analysts.
In a client note circulated this week, analysts led by CEO Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou said bitcoin mining economics are “deteriorating” in 2026. JPMorgan places the current all-in production cost of bitcoin at around $78,000, a figure derived from electricity, hardware depreciation and overhead expenses across public miners.
With bitcoin trading near $63,000, the gap between spot price and break-even has created sustained pressure across the sector.
One of the most notable shifts JPMorgan is highlighting is a structural change in how the Bitcoin network itself responds to price movements. The beta of mining difficulty for BTC prices – a measure of how much difficulty moves for a given price movement – ​​has increased to 0.62 over the past six months. This number reflects a network where a greater proportion of miners are sitting at or near their cost floor, turning machines on or off when prices change rather than maintaining consistent operation.
The pattern became visible in early June when mining difficulty dropped by 10.09%, the second largest single drop of the year. Bitcoin’s hashrate fell 12% in June, according to Galaxy Research. A comparable 10% severity reduction occurred in January, marking two episodes of this scale within a calendar year.
The financial strain has pushed listed miners into a corner. Operators including MARA, CleanSpark, Riot Platforms, Cango, Core Scientific and Bitdeer sold a combined 32,000 bitcoin in Q1 2026 alone to fund operating expenses, according to data from TheEnergyMag cited in the JPMorgan report. That number surpasses the combined bitcoin sales of these companies for all of 2025, setting a new quarterly record – eclipsing the previous high of 20,000 bitcoin set in Q2 2022 during the bear market that followed the Terra-Luna collapse.
Hashprice, a metric that captures mining revenue per unit of computing power, is around $33 per petahash per second per day, according to the Hashrate Index. That level puts roughly 20% of the global mining industry in unprofitable territory, according to CoinShares’ Q1 2026 Bitcoin Mining Report, which JPMorgan cited in its analysis.
A contrarian signal for bitcoin
Despite the gloomy conditions, JPMorgan’s analysts stopped short of a bearish conclusion. The team noted that weak market sentiment of this nature in previous cycles has acted as a contrarian indicator of future price appreciation.
They expect increased hashrate sensitivity and larger difficulty adjustments to continue as long as BTC remains well below the cost of production.
Further capitulation among higher cost operators is possible in the first half of 2026 without a significant price recovery. Miners collectively held approximately 1.8 million bitcoin at the time of publication, down from 1.86 million at the end of 2023, a sign that the draw on the treasury is an ongoing part of the current environment.