The most efficient bitcoin mining machines are selling for ~$24 per 100 terahashes, down from $106 in 2021, as unprofitable miners are forced to sell equipment
Unprofitable miners have become forced sellers of their own crypto equipment — There's a fire sale on bitcoin-mining hardware.
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the third time the mining hardware market has gone through this washout. A Diar report in 2018 found rising electricity costs were already making mining unprofitable for everyone but the biggest players, and firms that spent heavily ahead of the May 2020 halving reward cut got hit by that spring's price crash. In mid-2021, Bitmain suspended spot-delivery sales as rig prices dropped ~75%, and by September 2022 GPU miners were shutting off rigs and planning to sell their cards after Ethereum's Merge killed GPU mining profitability.
The difference now is that the forced selling has reached the most efficient ASICs themselves — the machines that should hold value best are down to ~$24 per 100 terahashes from $106 in 2021. That signals distress is no longer confined to marginal operators with old hardware; it is a sector-wide liquidity event.
First-order effects
- Unprofitable miners become forced sellers of equipment at roughly a quarter of 2021 prices, while any buyer with cheap power can now add hashrate at a fraction of replacement cost — accelerating the transfer of capacity from leveraged small operators to low-cost industrial players.
- Bitmain and other manufacturers face collapsed demand for new machines, because lightly-used top-efficiency rigs on the secondary market undercut new-unit pricing.
Second-order effects
- Surviving miners' cost structures reset lower as they pick up discounted hardware, pressuring remaining high-cost operators who cannot cover electricity bills even at current machine prices.
- Cheap, abundant second-hand rigs create the supply base for the pivot some miners later pursue — repurposing rigs to train AI models as an alternative to cloud compute costs.
Third-order effects
- Each cycle (2018's cost squeeze, 2020's halving prep, 2022's fire sale) concentrates mining further into fewer, larger, cheaper-power operators — a structural drift away from distributed hobbyist mining that regulators and grid planners increasingly have to treat as an industrial-load question.
- By 2025, miners' earnings power and stocks had diverged from bitcoin itself amid a languishing hashrate, suggesting the industry's economics are decoupling from the asset it produces — the endpoint of repeated liquidation-and-consolidation cycles like this one.
The trend: Crypto mining moves through recurring forced-liquidation cycles that transfer hardware and hashrate from indebted small operators to industrial-scale, low-cost players — increasingly with one eye on converting that infrastructure to non-mining compute workloads.