Mining

Mining is how Bitcoin transactions are confirmed and new supply is issued: specialised hardware competing to solve a hash puzzle, with difficulty adjusting roughly every two weeks to hold block times near ten minutes. Miners are the only structural sellers in the market — they have electricity bills denominated in fiat — which makes their behaviour a real supply signal rather than a sentiment one.

What we track on this desk

• Hashrate and difficulty. The network’s committed compute, and how the protocol responds to it.
• Miner economics. Hashprice, energy costs and the margin that determines who keeps operating after each halving.
• Treasury behaviour. Whether public miners are selling production or holding it, disclosed in monthly updates and filings.
• Energy and siting. Grid agreements, curtailment deals and the increasing overlap with AI data-centre demand for the same power and land.
• Corporate activity. Capacity expansions, acquisitions and the equity raises funding them.

How to read a mining story here

“Miner capitulation” is the phrase to watch for. It gets applied to any hashrate decline, but hashrate falls for mundane reasons — seasonal curtailment, a heatwave, a site relocation — and difficulty adjusts to compensate. A genuine capitulation shows up in machines going permanently offline and in treasury sales, not in a week of lower hashrate.

Hashrate itself is estimated, not measured: it is inferred from block times, so short-window figures are noisy by construction. Where two sources disagree because they used different averaging windows, the story is Disputed and both are shown with their method named.

Where to go next

See the Verification Center for how publishers are counted, or the Bitcoin hub for the asset this secures.