Bitcoin Mining
Bitcoin Mining Isn't Dying: Hashrate Myth vs Reality
Bitcoin's network hashrate just posted its first growth since 2025. Here's what that actually means against the "miners are all quitting" narrative.
A narrative has been building through 2026: Bitcoin miners are abandoning the network for AI contracts, hashrate is in structural decline, and solo mining is a shrinking bet on a shrinking game. Then came October 1, when Bitcoin's 30-day average hashrate reached roughly 944.6 exahashes per second, the highest level since June 13 and the first sustained network growth since 2025's capitulation began. The bitcoin mining hashrate recovery and the AI-pivot story are both real. They just aren't telling the same story about the same thing.
Myth: Miners Are Leaving Bitcoin for AI En Masse
The AI pivot is real and it is large. Across 2026, a number of publicly traded mining companies have signed contracts for AI and high-performance-computing work reportedly worth tens of billions of dollars combined, and some have cut installed Bitcoin hashrate by tens of exahashes to redirect power capacity toward that work. Mining-sector equities have, as a group, pulled meaningfully ahead of Bitcoin's own price this year on the strength of those deals.
Read quickly, that looks like an industry quietly walking away from mining. It is the headline version of the story, and it is the version that gets repeated without the second half.
Reality: Network Hashrate Just Posted Its First Growth Since 2025
The second half is this: total network hashrate did not follow the public companies that pivoted. It fell hard through late 2025 and early 2026, the kind of extended miner capitulation that CoinDesk reported as one of the longest on record, bottoming out well below its November 2025 peak. Then it turned. By October 1, the 30-day average had climbed back to its highest point since mid-June, still about 15% under that November 2025 high, but rising for the first time in close to a year.
The 944.6 EH/s figure is the 30-day average on October 1, 2026.
A shrinking number of large, AI-diversifying public operators pulling capacity in one direction does not automatically mean the whole network shrinks with them. Smaller operators, newer efficient hardware coming online, and capacity shifting between hands all pull the other way, and right now the second group is winning on the chart.
What a Recovering Bitcoin Mining Hashrate Means for Solo Odds
This is the part the myth and the reality both skip: what rising network hashrate means for anyone mining alone, on their own rig, rather than through a company with an AI contract on the side.
Take an illustrative example. A single modern SHA-256 rig running at 1.2 terahashes per second, against a network hashrate of 944.6 exahashes per second (944,600,000 terahashes per second), gives a per-block probability of 1.2 divided by 944,600,000, or about 1 in 787,000,000.
Bitcoin targets a block roughly every 10 minutes, which works out to about 52,560 blocks a year. Take the reciprocal of that per-block probability, about 787,000,000 blocks, and divide by 52,560 blocks per year, and the expected wait for that single rig comes out to roughly 14,980 years.
That number is not a reason to despair and it is not a reason to celebrate. Block finding is random, and an average is not a schedule: a real rig could find a block far sooner than that average, or never. Difficulty sets those odds, identically, at every pool a rig points at, NexusPool included. Rising network hashrate lengthens the average wait for solo miners generally. It says nothing about whether mining is "dying," because the two questions, is the network growing, and is my own expected wait getting longer, point in the same direction without meaning the same thing.
Myth and Reality, Side by Side
| The myth | The reality |
|---|---|
| "Miners are quitting Bitcoin for AI" | A subset of large public operators are redirecting some capacity to AI contracts. Total network hashrate just posted its first monthly growth since 2025. |
| "Falling hashrate means mining is unprofitable everywhere" | Hashrate fell, then recovered. Profitability varies by electricity cost and hardware efficiency, not by what any single company does. |
| "A smaller network means better odds for solo miners" | Difficulty adjusts to hashrate. A rig's odds depend on its own hashrate against the network's current total, not on a narrative about who's leaving. |
| "The right pool improves your odds" | No pool, NexusPool included, changes the odds difficulty sets. What a pool can do is show you exactly what it counted and exactly what it would pay. |
Where NexusPool Fits
NexusPool doesn't change any of the math above, and it never claims to. What it does is make the part of the process it controls checkable. Each hour, a signed receipt for the work we counted. BIP340, against a key we publish. Check it on our home page or in your own code, or against NexusPool's Glass Ledger page for how the receipts work.
The block pays your address. There is no balance for us to hold. 0% pool fee, and you can see the exact coinbase transaction that would pay you on the current block, before you've found one, using NexusPool's Payout Preflight. You can check how the pool's infrastructure is performing right now on NexusPool's status page.
This post makes no claim about future Bitcoin prices, no claim that NexusPool or any pool improves a miner's odds of finding a block, and no promise of a return on hardware or electricity. The network's hashrate recovering doesn't mean solo mining gets easier, and it recovering doesn't mean it's pointless either. It means the odds are what the network's current hashrate says they are, nothing more.
The Reality, In Short
Bitcoin's network hashrate is recovering even as a handful of its biggest public operators pivot capacity toward AI, and both of those things are true at the same time because they're answers to different questions.
Trust nothing. Verify the hashrate number yourself before you believe either version of the story.