Analysis: bitcoin's hashrate, or the power needed to mine it, has nearly halved from 168,000 PH/s on May 15 to 86,000 PH/s on June 23, as its price falls
Quick Take — Bitcoin hashrate has declined by nearly 50% in over a month, according to The Block Research.
Context & Ripple Effects
The Block Research's numbers put a hard figure on what the market already suspected: since mid-May, roughly half of bitcoin's mining power has gone dark, dropping from 168,000 PH/s to 86,000 PH/s. The timing lines up with bitcoin's slide below $30,000 — its lowest since late January after an April peak near $64,000 — and Beijing's ongoing crackdown on mining operations inside China.
This is a familiar reflex, not a new one. In 2019, Bitmain slashed its own internal mining output by 88% within a month when economics turned drastically cut its own mining capacity, and back in 2015 a price collapse below $185 pushed the hashrate down and made the network visibly volatile because mining simply stopped paying mining not profitable, making the network volatile. What is different this time is the driver: a regulatory eviction rather than only a margin squeeze.
First-order effects
- Miners who were plugged into Chinese power are now offline or scrambling to relocate machines, while those still running earn more of each block's rewards but against falling coin prices.
Second-order effects
- Hardware vendors and hosting providers outside China become the choke point: displaced rigs need new homes, shifting bargaining power toward jurisdictions with cheap power and clear rules.
- If the pattern from prior downturns holds, large operators like Bitmain will throttle their own fleets first before selling capacity, compressing demand for new mining hardware.
Third-order effects
- A hashrate that can halve in five weeks exposes how concentrated bitcoin's physical infrastructure had become in one jurisdiction, accelerating a structural redistribution of mining geography across borders.
- The episode reinforces a recurring systemic trait visible in 2015, 2019, and 2020: the network's security budget is directly coupled to price and regulation, so hashrate volatility is a feature of the design, not a malfunction.
The trend: Bitcoin's mining power is being forcibly de-concentrated out of China, turning hashrate into a live readout of where cheap energy and regulatory tolerance intersect.