Bitcoin’s $84K rally isn’t saving miners as difficulty signals already flash caution

Bitcoin’s post-retarget relief for miners was real, but narrow.Using a BTC price of $84,751, the completed difficulty increase and the latest gross hashprice is about $40.31 per petahash per second per day. That is roughly 2.65% above the prior modeled baseline.However, the next difficulty estimate is pointing 2.48% lower. The estimate came after only 14.43% of the new epoch, making it an early signal from slower blocks rather than a result or proof that miners were switching off.The two readings are compatible. Price had restored a modest amount of gross revenue per unit of computing power after the Sept. 19 retarget. The early block pace showed that the network’s next adjustment remained unsettled.Bitcoin mining economics improved versus the prior modelA Sept. 15 CryptoSlate analysis calculated that BTC would need to reach about $82,877 to neutralize the revenue-per-hash impact of the difficulty increase then forecast for Sept. 19. That was a modeled network threshold, not an industry-wide production cost.The realized adjustment was less severe than projected. Mempool’s completed difficulty history shows difficulty rose 4.1634% at block 967,680 on Sept. 19, from 127.451 trillion ...