Mike Smith
2 days ago
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At block 903,168, the Bitcoin network dropped 7.48% in difficulty to 116.96 T - the largest drop in 14 months. The cause was an abnormal heat wave in Texas and power outages in Iran, which controls about 4% of the global hashrate: farms in the US were shutting down, giving up megawatts to air conditioners, and Iranian sites were idle due to overloading of old substations.
The two-day power curtailment accelerated the release of units and triggered complexity adjustments. The automatic algorithm, in place since 2009, equalizes issuance every 2,016 blocks, protecting the protocol's monetary policy from climate and geopolitical shocks.
JPMorgan did the math: average hashrate fell about 3% in June, but revenue per unit of capacity rose to $55,300 per EH/s. The capitalization of thirteen public miners added $5.3 billion, and the leaders were companies combining mining and high-performance computing.
But the margin growth is temporary. In spring, when the hashrate reached 913 EH/s, TheMinerMag estimated the cost of mining at $70,000 vs. $64,000 in the first quarter: electricity and chip prices continue to squeeze profits.
The industry's energy balance is shifting. The Cambridge report records the share of sustainable sources rising to 52.4 %: hydro and wind farms give 42.6 %, nuclear 9.8 %. Gas took 38.2 % and coal dropped to 8.9 %. Even so, the total carbon footprint, according to Digiconomist, remains at 98 million tons of CO₂ per year - comparable to Qatar.
Texas demonstrates how climate volatility is becoming a business model: the power grid pays miners to pause, and revenue from such contracts often exceeds mining revenue.
Supplies of more efficient 4-nm ASICs and the fall cooling will quickly bring back the shuttered capacity, and complexity will go up again. Operators with flexible tariffs, their own renewable clusters and the ability to reduce load instantly will benefit, while those with fixed power costs above $0.08/kWh will have to modernize fleets or mothball equipment until mandatory energy reporting makes transparency and sustainability an absolute requirement.
The infrastructure sector sees a chance for growth. Modular data center manufacturers offer evaporative cooling, saving up to 30% of resources, and new sites are popping up in Canada, Paraguay and Oman, where cheap green electricity is combined with demand-response contracts.
Capital follows performance: index funds of miners raised $420 million in the second half of June, most of it to companies with their own power plants. Trading houses are hedging the drop in complexity with hash futures, expecting a new record high by the fourth quarter.
Shifting computing power to wind, water and geothermal sources, buying long-term energy contracts and participating in balancing markets are becoming familiar tools of competition; against this backdrop, a farm's carbon passport is quoted by investors as much as its hash rate.
