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

Source: https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2026/03/22/bitcoin-miners-are-losing-usd19-000-on-every-btc-produced-as-difficulty-drops-7-8
Kiwi News: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/Bitcoin-miners-are-losing-dollar19000-on-every-BTC-produced-as-difficulty-drops-78percent?index=0x69dac6bc60439ae162f62e2f548640f49707f208a201686a929081abb2dfc354da472f64
Submitted by misha on 2026-04-11 UTC, 2 upvotes, 0 comments

## Summary

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.