Bitcoin Difficulty Set for a Second 5% Jump as Miners' Revenue per Unit of Hashpower Drops 15% Since Early October

Bitcoin's difficulty is on track for a rise of about 5.3% around Oct. 29 after a 5.9% jump on Oct. 16. By our calculation, revenue per PH/s per day would fall to about $34.4.

Oct 24, 2026 - 12:22

Bitcoin Difficulty Set for a Second 5% Jump as Miners' Revenue per Unit of Hashpower Drops 15% Since Early October

Graphic-novel illustration of mining machines pushing a giant golden Bitcoin up a steep staircase beside a dial turning upward, in a vast mining hall at sunset

Quick take

Bitcoin's difficulty is on track for a rise of about 5.3% around Oct. 29, after a 5.9% jump on Oct. 16.
By our calculation, revenue per unit of hashpower would fall to about $34.4 per PH/s per day, down 15% since early October.
Transaction fees made up just 0.5% of miner revenue over the past week.

Bitcoin's mining difficulty is on course for a second consecutive increase of more than 5% around Oct. 29, as of block 972,909 on Saturday, Oct. 24, according to data from the mempool.space explorer.

Two jumps in a row would lift difficulty by about 11.5% in roughly two weeks. That would take it to around 148 trillion, roughly back to its December 2025 level, even as the Bitcoin price sits near $80,500. For miners, the squeeze comes from both sides: more competition for the same block reward, and a lower dollar value for that reward.

The mechanism is built into the protocol. In the Bitcoin white paper, Satoshi Nakamoto wrote that "the proof-of-work difficulty is determined by a moving average targeting an average number of blocks per hour." In practice, the network resets the target every 2,016 blocks so that blocks arrive every ten minutes on average.

Blocks are arriving too fast

They are currently arriving faster than that. Blocks in the current period have averaged about 570 seconds, against a 600-second target, mempool.space data show. With 819 blocks left before the reset at height 973,728, the explorer projects a difficulty change of about +5.3%. The previous adjustment, on Oct. 16 at block 971,712, raised difficulty by 5.92% to 140.58 trillion.

Faster blocks mean more machines are switched on. The explorer's estimate of network hashrate stands near 1,069 exahashes per second. The direction is clearer than the level, because hashrate can only be inferred from how quickly blocks are found.

The economics are where it bites. Miners earn the 3.125 BTC subsidy set by the halving schedule in Bitcoin Core's GetBlockSubsidy function, plus transaction fees. Over the last 1,008 blocks (blocks 971,902 to 972,909), fees totalled 15.95 BTC out of 3,165.95 BTC in total rewards, or 0.5%, according to mempool.space reward statistics. The subsidy is doing almost all the work.

By BullishStation's calculation, a miner's expected revenue at today's difficulty and a price of $80,511 is about $36.2 per petahash per second per day. After a 5.3% increase at the same price, that falls to about $34.4. At the start of the October 3 period, with difficulty at 132.72 trillion and Bitcoin at $84,667, the same figure was about $40.3. That is a drop of nearly 15% in a month.

The formula is simple: block reward times blocks per day times price, divided by the hashpower needed to win them, which difficulty sets. It ignores electricity, which is the cost that actually decides who switches off.

How this compares with the past year

History offers a sharp contrast. Difficulty reached its all-time high of 155.97 trillion at the adjustment of Oct. 29, 2025, when Bitcoin traded near $113,000. On the same calculation, a petahash then earned about $45.8 a day, roughly a third more than the post-adjustment figure we project now.

This year has been a round trip. Difficulty fell 10.09% on June 14, 2026, its second-largest cut of the year after an 11.2% drop in February, when Bitcoin was near $64,500. From that low of 124.93 trillion, the projected October level would be about 18.5% higher. Machines that were switched off in the spring have clearly come back.

That said, the pressure may not ease soon. With fees near zero, miners depend almost entirely on price. A falling price combined with rising difficulty is the classic setup for weaker operators to sell coins or unplug. Our explainer on how the halving works shows why the subsidy will only shrink further, to 1.5625 BTC in 2028.

Pool structure is shifting at the same time. Binance plans to close its mining pool on Nov. 10, as we reported in our Binance Pool analysis, which means hashrate will be redistributed among other pools. Demand-side signals are mixed too: spot Bitcoin ETFs lost $635.6 million on Oct. 22, our ETF flows tracker shows.

Macro adds another layer. The Federal Reserve decides on rates on Oct. 28, and a hawkish outcome would weigh on the price that miners depend on, as our FOMC tracker details.

Two dates matter next. The difficulty reset is expected around Oct. 29 at block 973,728; the exact change will depend on how quickly the remaining blocks arrive. Binance Pool's closure follows on Nov. 10.

Sources: mempool.space mining dashboard and API (difficulty adjustments, reward statistics, prices; data as of block 972,909, Oct. 24, 2026) · Bitcoin Core, validation.cpp (GetBlockSubsidy) · Bitcoin white paper (2008)

Methodology: revenue per PH/s per day = (3.125 BTC subsidy × 1.005 fee uplift) × 86,400 × price ÷ (difficulty × 2^32), expressed per 10^15 hashes per second; price from mempool.space. Projected difficulty change is an estimate and will change as blocks are mined.

This article is for information only and is not investment advice. Crypto-assets are volatile and you can lose all of your capital.