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Bitcoin Mining Enters a New Reality: Even the China Ban Wasn’t This Bad
Bitcoin mining difficulty has now remained below its all-time high for longer than at any point in the asset's history.
Brief
Bitcoin's mining difficulty hit an all-time high of nearly 156 trillion on October 29, 2025, according to on-chain data. It later stood just above 148 trillion, about 5% below that peak, and has not returned to the record. The current stretch without a new high now exceeds the previous longest, which ran roughly 364 days from August 2011 to July 2012. Author Saifedean Ammous called the slowdown structural. He pointed to halvings, which cut the block subsidy roughly every four years, and to AI companies competing for the cheap power and data-center space miners once had. He said Core Scientific plans to exit Bitcoin mining by year-end and become an AI and high-performance computing colocation provider, having already cut its mining fleet by almost half.
Why it matters: Sustained weakness in mining difficulty and miners shifting power toward AI hosting shows how competing demands for energy and data-center space are reshaping Bitcoin's network.
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Bitcoin mining difficulty sits about 5% below its October 2025 record
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