Nearly a fifth of all Bitcoin mining power is sitting completely dark, and turning it back on could trigger a brutal margin trap

Mining services firm Luxor estimates that about 235 exahashes per second (EH/s) of capacity in specialized Bitcoin mining machines is sitting idle.Its Sept. 8 report puts that equipment in several categories: machines that are uneconomic, deliberately curtailed, in transit, or under maintenance. Their different reasons for switching off make a rebound in hashrate an ambiguous signal of recovery from financial distress.August’s Bitcoin rally improved the revenue available from mining, while Texas’s summer window for avoiding peak-related transmission charges runs through September.Either route can eventually add competition for the miners that stayed online. The revenue recovery that encourages a restart may become smaller once enough other operators make the same decision.According to Luxor’s August lookback, dollar-denominated hashprice rose 24.4% during the month, from $31.63 to $39.33 per petahash per second per day. Hashprice measures expected mining revenue for a given amount of computing power, before electricity and other expenses.Bitcoin’s price rose 24.5% over the same period, from $62,889 to $78,312 in Luxor’s data. A more valuable Bitcoin increases the dollar value of th...