Bitcoin Mining Under Pressure with Declining Profitability

The Bitcoin network has just recorded its third difficulty increase since the beginning of the year. Good news on the surface, but behind this technical rebound hides a much darker reality for miners. And the current signals already announce an imminent turnaround.

A Deceptive Adjustment

At block 943,488, the Bitcoin difficulty climbed by 3.87%. This adjustment occurred on April 4, 2026, after a week of particularly slow blocks. It is the seventh adjustment of the year, with a tally of three increases and four decreases, evidence that the network is going through a period of unusual instability.

This rebound follows a 7.76% drop during the previous period. Technically, the difficulty is now 138.97 trillion times higher than it was at Bitcoin’s launch. A staggering figure illustrating the progress made since the first blocks were mined from a desktop computer.

Yet, this rebound is on shaky ground. At 4 p.m. Eastern Time, only 181 of the current era’s 2,016 blocks had been extracted, placing the network at about 9% toward the next adjustment. 

The hashrateindex.com data indicates an average block time of 11 minutes and 39 seconds, well above the target pace of 10 minutes. At this rate, estimates point to a difficulty reduction of 14.27% on the upcoming April 19.

The reason for this slowdown? A sharp drop in hashrate. At the end of March, the network’s total computing power briefly crossed the symbolic threshold of 1,000 exahash per second (EH/s), or 1 zettahash. Since then, it has fallen by 60.45 EH/s to settle at 961.55 EH/s. This decline is not trivial.

Bitcoin Miners Running on Empty

This hashrate decrease is no coincidence, it signals an industry under pressure. The daily hash price, at $30.67 per petahash per second (PH/s), is near its historic lows. 

For reference, a similar level was observed in February 2026, when a winter storm forced operators like Foundry USA to shut down their machines in an emergency.

Today, it is not the weather suffocating miners, but the economy. With transaction fees representing barely 0.56% of the block reward, ancillary revenues offer no safety net. And 106,335 blocks still remain to be mined before the next halving, meaning conditions will continue to harden.

Faced with this margin squeeze, a major trend is accelerating: large mining companies are diverting their computing power toward artificial intelligence. Renting servers to AI platforms now pays much more than mining Bitcoin. Riot Platforms, which sold 3,778 BTC in the first quarter of 2026, perfectly illustrates this.

Paradoxically, it is in this bleak climate that a solo miner connected to CKPool managed to validate block 943,411 in early April, winning 3.139 BTC, about $210,000. A rare feat in a sector dominated by industrial farms, but it reminds that Bitcoin still retains an element of unpredictability.

The Adjustment Mechanism, the Network’s Safeguard

Bitcoin is designed to withstand such turbulence. If miners quit and the hashrate decreases, difficulty automatically drops every 2,016 blocks, making mining again accessible and profitable for new entrants. This is exactly what the data anticipates for April 19.

This self-regulation mechanism, conceived by Satoshi Nakamoto, remains one of the most underestimated assets of the Bitcoin protocol. It guarantees the network’s continuity, regardless of market conditions or economic actors’ decisions.

The real question now is not whether difficulty will drop—it most likely will. It is about how many Bitcoin miners will hold on until conditions become favorable again.