The difficulty of Bitcoin mining hit the brakes in 2025. For the first time in the network’s history, difficulty is rising at a slower pace, and is steadily progressing at the slowest annual difficulty growth ever recorded.
Integration signals in the Bitcoin mining landscape
The difficulty of Bitcoin mining has risen by 0.5% since June 1, indicating an extraordinary slowdown in network expansion. Mining difficulty has increased by just 16% since the start of the year, according to a post on the Mining Infrastructure Firm Blockware’s X. “2025 is paced to see the slowest growth in BTC history,” added Blockware.
Mining growth continues to slow down due to the following reasons: Mining hardware is at the limits of Moore’s law. This approaches the physical and economic limits of chip miniaturization, making new generations of miners slightly more efficient.
Physical infrastructure and energy production is a bottleneck for growth and to promote scaling of mining and ordering machines. Finally, data center operators are diversifying into AI and high performance computing (HPC).
However, this is bullish for BTC minors. This is because there is less competition for 450 BTC mined daily. As BTC trends are steadily moving towards the six-person figure, miners are positioned in arbitrage energy and calculations, producing BTC at a significant discount on their market value.
Currently hosted on a blockware mining site, the Bitmain S21 XP produces 1 BTC for just $55,000 in electricity costs. This is a huge discount on the market price of BTC. The advantage of BTC mining is its ability to depreciate 100% of hardware costs and create a strong tax offset. When combined with tax benefits and accumulation of BTC, this is how generational wealth is born.
Shift to cleaner energy and sustainable mining
SustainableBTC highlighted X that a Newsweek article in 2017 warned that by 2020 Bitcoin was on track to consume global energy. Furthermore, in 2019, an academic paper reported that emissions from BTC mining alone exceeded global temperatures of 2°C.
Since then, there has been a widespread belief that BTC mining is environmentally harmful. But in reality, BTC mining is a powerful tool in the transition to clean energy and could be a force for climate justice.
In the midst of this broad view, SustainableBTC noted that awareness and advocacy alone is not enough to change the deeply rooted perceptions of BTC mining and sustainability. Moving the industry requires transparent, auditable data, market-based incentives that are consistent with economic performance, and environmental responsibility.
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