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. Bitcoin’s mining industry is showing unusual weakness, even as the network remains highly valuable. With the difficulty metric still below its October 2025 record more than a year later, the focus has shifted to whether miners face a temporary downturn or whether capital and electricity are permanently migrating elsewhere. Unwanted Record Hit According to on-chain data, the Bitcoin mining difficulty reached an all-time high of almost 156 trillion on October 29, 2025. As of press time, it stood at just over 148 trillion, which is still 5% below that peak and hasn’t been able to break it ever since. This means that the current period without a new difficulty record has now exceeded the previous longest stretch, which lasted roughly 364 days between August 2011 and July 2012. Back then, Bitcoin’s price collapsed by roughly 94%-95%, while another exceptionally long difficulty downturn in 2021 followed China’s sweeping ban on domestic crypto mining, which forced a substantial portion of global hash rate to relocate. Saifedean Ammous, author of The Bitcoin Standard, not...