JPMorgan analysts led by Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou estimate Bitcoin's production cost at roughly $85,000, putting the figure in a September 23 note as a "soft floor" for the market. The bank's number — $84,948 — sits about 2.4% above where Bitcoin is trading now, meaning the average miner is underwater on the coins it produces.
The "soft" qualifier matters. A production cost doesn't put a hard bid under the price the way a bond's face value does. Miners can shut off machines, renegotiate power contracts or sell reserves to stay solvent. What the estimate actually measures is how much pain the network's marginal producer is absorbing before it starts switching things off.
280 days below cost
By JPMorgan's count, Bitcoin has now spent 280 days below its production cost. That's longer than the roughly 224-day stretch during the 2018 mining downturn, when the network's weakest operators were flushed out and hashrate followed.
The comparison is uncomfortable for anyone expecting a quick snapback. In 2018 the industry eventually reset — difficulty fell, unprofitable rigs went dark, and the survivors waited for the next cycle. This time the reset is happening alongside a new option that didn't exist eight years ago: renting the same racks and power contracts to AI compute buyers.
Bitcoin did get a brief reprieve earlier this week, ticking up to $87,000. It didn't hold. The number is worth keeping in perspective — $87,000 is still only marginally above the cost estimate, and miners need a sustained move higher, not a spike, to repair their margins.
Hashrate and difficulty are already dropping
The network's underlying metrics are telling the same story. Bitcoin's hashrate has fallen about 19% from its October peak, and mining difficulty is down roughly 15%. The 30-day average hashrate has slid from about 1,105 EH/s in late 2025 to 895 EH/s in August, recovering only to around 947 EH/s — barely above the 60-day average of 943 EH/s.
Those two averages converging is the tell. When the short-term hashrate line flattens against the longer-term one, the network has stopped expanding and is roughly treading water.
Higher-cost miners have responded the way you'd expect. They've powered down machines, retired older rigs, hunted for cheaper electricity, and in some cases redirected capacity to AI workloads entirely. That last part is the structural difference from previous cycles — mining capacity has somewhere else to go now.
What miners are doing with their coins
Miner-to-exchange flows have been shrinking through the year. They peaked in February at nearly 24,000 BTC, then dropped to about 12,400 BTC in June, ticked back up to roughly 13,500 BTC in August, and fell again to around 10,000 BTC in September.
The September figure is the lowest of the sequence. Lower exchange inflows from miners can mean several things — that they're holding, that they've already sold, or that there are fewer marginal miners left with coins to move. Given the shutdown activity JPMorgan describes, the third explanation is plausible.
For the price to clear the cost line with any conviction, either hashrate needs to fall far enough to reset the difficulty, or Bitcoin needs to rally. JPMorgan's note doesn't forecast which. The bank's contribution is the number itself, and the observation that the market has been content to sit below it for the better part of a year.
