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Bitcoin’s Projected Difficulty Cut Still Leaves Older S19 Miners Below Break-Even

By Isaac • November 10, 2026 3:14 pm • Comments

Bitcoin miners may get a meaningful break from the network’s next difficulty adjustment. For older machines, however, the math still looks brutal.

A projected 6.5% difficulty reduction would increase expected revenue per unit of computing power by roughly 7%, assuming Bitcoin’s price, the block subsidy and transaction fees do not change.

Even that relief would not make two older Antminer S19 variants profitable on electricity priced at five cents per kilowatt-hour.

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That is the central finding in a new CryptoSlate analysis built around a Hashrate Index projection dated November 9. The estimate put Bitcoin mining difficulty at 148.36 trillion, spot hashprice at $31.89 per petahash per second per day, and the next adjustment near November 13.

If difficulty falls by the projected amount, modeled hashprice rises to about $34.11 per PH/s/day. Hashprice is a useful shorthand for how much gross daily revenue a unit of mining capacity can expect before electricity, pool fees, cooling, labor, financing and other expenses.

The problem is efficiency. The modeled S19 machines produce 90 or 95 terahashes per second while drawing a nominal 3,250 watts.

At the higher post-adjustment hashprice, their gross mining revenue still would not cover a five-cent power bill.

A newer 200 TH/s S21 drawing 3,500 watts performs much better, but even that machine would have only a thin electricity cushion at eight cents per kWh. In the model, it clears the power bill by roughly ten cents per day before every other cost of operating a mining site.

Reaching electricity break-even is only the first hurdle. It does not make the mining operation profitable.

Pool charges, separate cooling loads, repairs, employees, hosting overhead, debt service and the hardware itself all sit beyond the simplified power calculation.

Difficulty adjusts automatically as the network tries to keep blocks arriving about every ten minutes. When miners shut machines down and blocks slow, a downward retarget can improve revenue for the capacity that remains online.

The adjustment date and size remain estimates until the period closes. A change in Bitcoin’s price or transaction fees can quickly overwhelm the modeled benefit.

The squeeze is one reason major miners increasingly talk about power as the scarce asset rather than treating every megawatt as automatically destined for Bitcoin. MARA’s latest shareholder update framed its strategy around maximizing the value of controlled power capacity—a reminder that miners now compare Bitcoin economics with hosting, high-performance computing and other potential uses for the same infrastructure.

For the market, the next adjustment will offer a real-time test of which operators and machine fleets can survive at today’s revenue levels.

Efficient equipment with unusually cheap power can gain breathing room. Older rigs at ordinary commercial rates may remain stranded even after one of the largest downward adjustments of the year.

The bottom line is simple: lower difficulty helps every surviving miner, but it does not erase the widening gap between current-generation hardware and machines built for a much richer hashprice environment.

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