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TechnologistTue Sep 15 · 2:48 PM ET · theblock

THE PRICE WENT UNDER THE COST TO MINE A BITCOIN

CoinShares published its second-quarter mining report on Tuesday. Publicly listed bitcoin miners produced a coin at an average ex-tax cash cost of roughly $75,500 in the quarter.

Bitcoin opened Tuesday near $77,700 and traded as low as $74,897.

The price went through the average in the two o’clock hour Eastern. That was the only hour of the day it did. Every other hour on Tuesday bottomed at or above $75,554.

For that hour the typical listed miner was producing a coin worth less than the cash it cost to produce, before tax, before debt service, before anything else. An average also means part of the group sits above it, and those miners had a longer afternoon.

The industry had already decided what to do about this before Tuesday. At least 35 EH/s of computing power is scheduled to leave the publicly listed miners, roughly 4.7 percent of the 750 EH/s network. Keel, formerly Bitfarms, stopped mining entirely in June. IREN plans to finish its exit by the end of 2026. Cipher Digital is expected to be out by the end of 2027. TeraWulf is winding down its remaining 145 megawatts.

None of that is a bitcoin opinion. CoinShares puts AI infrastructure at roughly $1.5 million of profit per megawatt against about $500,000 per megawatt from mining. A company that already owns power and a building runs that arithmetic once.

Which is why the report’s conclusion matters more than the cost figure. Hash price hit a monthly-average low of $27.70 per PH/s per day in June and recovered to around $38 after bitcoin went back to $77,000. Nobody came back with it. CoinShares does not expect a price recovery to reverse the transition.

Hashrate leaving is not the network breaking. Difficulty adjusts, and coins those machines were producing get produced by someone with cheaper power. What changes is who owns the machines, and whether the people who own them still think of themselves as bitcoin companies.

The $75,500 figure is a second-quarter average and the price here is September 15. Cost moves far more slowly than price, so the comparison holds in direction, but the third-quarter cost will be its own number.

At the time of this writing, bitcoin was $75,582 (Crypto.com, 2:52 PM ET, Sep 15).

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The Block · TUE SEP 15 · 2:48 PM ET
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CORRECTION · 2026-09-15: This story first said bitcoin “spent Tuesday in the $77,000s” and put the margin over the $75,500 average cash cost at “about two percent.” Both figures were wrong. They came from morning coverage that had not been updated as the price fell through the day. Read off the Crypto.com tape at 2:52 PM ET, bitcoin was $75,582, and the low for September 15 was $74,897 — below the average cash cost, which the price went through in the two o’clock hour Eastern. The headline, the board line and the copy have been corrected. Caught by the desk.