Bitcoin is getting too expensive to mine profitably: What breaks first — hashrate, UX, or ideology?
Bitcoin mining has quietly become the network’s backstage struggle: subsidies shrank after the halving, energy bills keep marching upward, and miners are getting creative just to keep the lights on. With the fixed block subsidy now down to 3.125 BTC, fees have to do a lot of heavy lifting — and sometimes they wobble.
Miners, margins, and the fee dance
Let’s put on a hard-hat and look at the economics without the math teacher yelling. Today’s network-wide computing power is roughly in the low zettahash range, and daily block subsidy across 144 blocks is on the order of a few hundred BTC. That means base miner income from subsidy is a predictable slice, but fees are the wild card.
Think of fees as three possible moods: sleepy (tiny fees), steady (moderate fees), and chaotic (fee bonanza). In a sleepy window, fees are a rounding error — miners mostly collect the subsidy and barely anything else. In steady mode, fees become a meaningful uplift and can be the difference between scraping by and covering marginal costs. In chaotic periods — think big inscription waves or sudden demand spikes — fees can reset the whole unit-economics game and flood miner coffers.
How does that translate to everyday numbers? On a low-fee day, the extra per-petahash revenue is almost nothing. On a moderate fee day you can add a noticeable percentage to miner revenue. On peak fee days the uplift can be huge — enough to give struggling rigs a lifeline and let operators pay down costs accumulated during lean stretches.
What could snap — hashrate, UX, or ideology?
Hashrate: If fees stay weak while power prices spike, marginal rigs get turned off. That flattens hashrate growth and can even squeeze it down — not instant doom, but a slower, noisier network that adjusts difficulty and tries to rebalance. The practical cost to attack the chain (for example, a 51% run) remains enormous in either electricity or hardware terms, but lower fees make those attack thresholds comparatively easier to approach — not practical for most, but a useful stress-test number for the system.
UX (user experience): When fees are calm, confirmations are cheap and people are delighted. But cheap can be dangerous: wallets and exchanges rely on predictable fee-bumping tools so users aren’t stuck forever with unconfirmed transactions. Recent protocol and mempool improvements let nodes and wallets coordinate fee bumps more reliably, which reduces the chance of stuck transactions and makes small-fee confirmations more monetizable for miners. These changes don’t conjure new demand, but they do make the fee market less flaky — which is good for everyday users and for miners trying to plan revenue.
Ideology (the thought experiments people have over coffee): The classic scare is a coordinated takeover of hashpower. There are two ways to think about that — energy cost and hardware price. Running enough modern machines to control a majority of the network implies an eye-watering power bill (on the order of many megawatts per hour) and, if you tried to buy hardware instead of renting, a multi-billion-dollar hardware tab. Those are big barriers. Still, rising fees raise the network’s equilibrium hashrate and push that attack cost even higher, so sustained fee inflation actually hardens the network in the long run.
So what’s likely next? With forward-looking miner revenue indicators in the low tens of dollars per petahash per day, margins look thin for power-hungry fleets unless fees show up regularly. Protocol-level niceties that smooth fee bumps and mempool behavior will help normalize things for users and give miners a better chance to capture revenue from small, bumped transactions. If pools keep including ultra-low-fee transactions during quiet periods, baseline fee pressure can drift down again — it’s a tug-of-war between policy and practice.
Bottom line: don’t expect a sudden collapse. Expect a wobbly, opportunistic market where a few high-fee days rescue marginal miners, steady policy and wallet improvements reduce annoying stuck transactions, and long-term security gets stronger if fees climb often enough. Keep an eye on fee behavior and forward miner revenue numbers — they’re the thermostat for this whole operation.