Bitcoin miners are losing $19,000 on every BTC produced as difficulty drops 7.8%

Bitcoin miners are operating at a steep loss, with Checkonchain's difficulty regression model estimating average production costs of $88,000 per bitcoin as of March 13 against a market price of about $69,200. Rising energy prices tied to Middle East tensions, including oil above $100 and the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz, are squeezing margins and pushing hashrate and network difficulty down. Difficulty fell 7.76% on Saturday to 133.79 trillion, and Luxor's Hashrate Index put hashprice near $33.30 per petahash per second per day, close to breakeven for most hardware. Miners are selling more bitcoin and expanding into AI and high-performance computing, including Marathon Digital and Cipher Mining.