DIFFICULTY DOWN 14% — SECOND YOY DROP IN NETWORK HISTORY. THE NETWORK SELF-REGULATES.

Bitcoin mining difficulty is now 126.23 trillion after a 0.74% adjustment lower, printing about 1.1% below the year-earlier level and 19.1% off the November 2025 all-time high of 155.97T. Only twice in network history has difficulty gone negative year-over-year — the first time was after China’s 2021 mining ban temporarily removed half of the network’s hashrate. This one has no single-event trigger. It’s pure economics: bitcoin price soft, hashprice compressed, capital and power siphoning to AI and HPC infrastructure.

Hashprice sits at $31.7 per petahash per day after touching a $27.66 low in late June. Luxor’s forward market prices an average $31.85/PH/d through December — which is to say, no meaningful revenue recovery is priced in for the back half of the year. Curtailments in Texas and disruptions in other mining regions are absorbing the marginal capacity, and the surviving fleet is consolidating margin the only way it can when total revenue per unit hash is flat: by outlasting the operators that shut off.

The Fundamentalist read: this is the third-deepest ASIC-era drawdown, and the network is doing exactly what it’s designed to do. Difficulty is the network’s self-regulating clock — when hashrate falls, blocks arrive slower, difficulty resets down, remaining miners earn more per hash, and equilibrium restores. That’s the protocol working, not the protocol breaking. The cyclicality is a feature, not a bug. Over the long cycle, this compresses the marginal miner base and hands more of the reward flow to the operators who financed their build at prices that survive a hashprice trough. Long-cycle discipline continues to price.