Bitcoin Difficulty Hits 148 Trillion: What It Means for Used Miners
Bitcoin difficulty is now 148.36 trillion, and a used Antminer S19k Pro only makes money below about 6.0 cents per kilowatt-hour. That is the short answer. The long answer matters if you are buying machines this month, so here is the arithmetic, taken from live network data on November 1.
Where bitcoin difficulty 148 trillion came from
Difficulty adjusts every 2,016 blocks. The last change landed on October 29 and raised it 5.54% to 148.36 trillion, according to mempool.space. It followed a 5.92% rise on October 16 and a flat reading on October 3. See the Bitcoin wiki if you want the mechanics.
Hashrate is the reason. The network averaged about 1,069 EH/s over the past day. It peaked near 1,152 EH/s on October 21, and it sat near 823 EH/s in mid-August. In other words, more machines came online, and the protocol made the puzzle harder to keep blocks at ten minutes.
What the next adjustment looks like
The next change lands at block 975,744, about 11 days away. Right now the estimate is -0.7%, which is basically flat. However, that estimate moves with every block, so treat it as a lean and not a promise.
The hashprice maths
Hashprice is what one petahash per second earns in a day. Over the last 144 blocks, miners collected 452.0 BTC. Fees were only 0.45% of that, so the block subsidy is doing nearly all the work. At $77,899 per bitcoin, that works out to about $32.9 per PH/s per day. Other trackers show somewhere between $33 and $36, depending on how they average.
Now apply it to a machine. The Antminer S19k Pro is rated at 115 TH/s and 2,645 W, and we sell it used at $379.99. It earns about $3.79 a day before power. It uses 63.5 kWh a day. So the break-even price for power is 6.0 cents per kWh. That figure ignores pool fees, cooling and downtime, so real break-even is a little lower.
| Machine | Hashrate | Power | Gross per day | Break-even power |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Antminer S19k Pro | 115 TH/s | 2,645 W | $3.79 | 6.0 cents/kWh |
| Antminer S19 XP | 141 TH/s | 3,010 W | $4.64 | 6.4 cents/kWh |
What it means if you pay 8 cents
At 8 cents, the Antminer S19k Pro costs $5.08 a day to run. It earns $3.79. That is a loss of $1.29 a day. Therefore, you need power under 6.0 cents before the first dollar of profit. A 5% rise in difficulty would pull that line down to about 5.7 cents. For example, the Antminer S19 XP breaks even at 6.4 cents today.
Cheap power is the whole game. The machine price is the part you can control, which is why used hardware matters. Also, the next halving, due in 2028, will cut the subsidy in half again.
What we would do
First, check your real power price, delivered, including demand charges. Then run the break-even above against it. If you clear it with room to spare, buy. If you do not, wait, because a weak hashprice can push used prices down.
We work through these numbers in our S19k Pro vs S19 XP comparison. You can also browse every miner in stock, or sell us your used miners if the maths says you should get out. For where Bitcoin itself may go, see our Bitcoin price prediction.
-Nick
ING Mining
This is general information, not financial advice. Crypto is volatile, and exchanges can fail. Please do your own research.