- Bitcoin is due for another difficulty adjustment this week.
- It’s expected that the next mining difficulty adjustment will drop.
- That means a weaker network — should investors be worried?
Mining Bitcoin is about to get easier — but is that a good thing?
For the fifth time in a row, difficulty on the largest and oldest crypto network will drop on Thursday, making it even easier for mining operations to mint new Bitcoin.
Mining difficulty automatically drops to encourage more mining machines to join the network and earn new Bitcoin as a reward.
Thus, a decrease means that less computing power is being directed toward a crypto network, and with less computing power comes less security.
It also becomes easier for miners who stick around to add blocks to the blockchain and earn rewards.
“In my opinion this is quite bullish for miners that are staying online,” Nick Hansen, CEO and co-founder of the Luxor mining pool, told DL News.
The expected drop of around 3.38% comes as it becomes harder to make ends meet in the cutthroat mining industry, with many miners shifting their focus to high-powered computing and artificial intelligence.
Top publicly traded miners in 2025 all signed deals to make the pivot, with Terawulf, IREN, and Cipher Mining all inking multi-year HPC contracts with Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Microsoft.
Miners switching off from minting coins means less computing power — understood as hashrate — directed at the industry.
“I would say that a good portion of this hashrate drop is miners taking a different path with the megawatts that they have,” said Hansen.
Is the pivot to AI a bad thing?
Some companies have stopped mining Bitcoin altogether, while others have rebranded to “compute” or “digital infrastructure” companies, switching between minting digital coins and providing compute for AI, depending on which is more profitable.
Still, the two “are not in a zero-sum competition for power,” Canaan’s Head of Capital Markets Leo Wang told DL News.
He added that the two industries can work in harmony, with miners having flexible energy requirements — Bitcoin miners can quickly power up or down depending on an energy grid’s needs — while HPC operations need constant, reliable power.
American miners shutting off or directing their power to other industries means that operations from other countries can step in.
American miners currently control the highest share of hashrate on the network, at roughly 38%, according to the Hashrate Index.
When China’s government clamped down on Bitcoin mining in 2021, when the country led the industry, miners simply shut off and set up shop in the US.
“Today, Nasdaq-listed companies are expanding their footprints far beyond the United States, utilizing global diversification to offset regional risks and capitalize on more competitive power and labor costs,” Canaan’s Head of Capital Markets Leo Wang told DL News.
What should investors think?
A lower hashrate means the crypto network is less secure and vulnerable to attack, but investors shouldn’t be worried, Hansen said.
“Bitcoin’s still very secure — there are tens of millions of mining machines securing the network to this day,” he said. “There’s really no 51% attack risk or anything like that.”
Wang added that if miners do power off, “new energy sources, including previously stranded energy,” are harnessed elsewhere.
Mathew Di Salvo is a news correspondent with DL News. Got a tip? Email at mdisalvo@dlnews.com.
