Bitcoin mining has evolved from a hobby for home-computer enthusiasts into one of the largest computing industries in the world. It runs on specialized hardware, consumes electricity on the scale of a mid-sized country, and generates tens of millions of dollars in daily revenue for the miners that keep the blockchain secure.

As of October 2026, the Bitcoin network was operating at close to one zettahash per second. At the same time, the industry is contending with declining block subsidies, competition for power and facilities from artificial intelligence data centers, and a persistent search for cheaper electricity.

What follows is a compilation of the most important Bitcoin mining statistics, drawing on data from the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, Hashrate Index, mempool.space, Glassnode and other sources.

Key Numbers at a Glance

The figures below reflect conditions as of October 2026:

• Estimated seven-day hashrate: ~983 EH/s (roughly 0.98 zettahashes per second)
• Mining difficulty: ~132.72 trillion
• All-time hashrate peak: ~1,110 EH/s (November 2025)
• Top mining country: United States (~35.6% of estimated global hashrate)
• Current block subsidy: 3.125 BTC per block
• New BTC created daily: ~450 BTC
• Daily miner revenue: roughly $30 million–$45 million
• Transaction fees as a share of revenue: ~0.69%
• Annual electricity consumption: ~138 TWh
• Share of global electricity: ~0.54%
• Share of power from sustainable sources: 52.4%

Bitcoin Network Hashrate

Hashrate measures the total computing power directed at the Bitcoin network. It is denominated in exahashes per second (EH/s), where one exahash equals one quintillion individual hashing operations. The metric is widely watched as a gauge of network security: the more computing power defends the chain, the more expensive it becomes for any single actor to attempt to rewrite recent transaction history.

Bitcoin's seven-day estimated hashrate stood at approximately 983 EH/s in early October 2026, placing the network near the one-zettahash-per-second threshold. At that level, miners collectively perform close to one sextillion cryptographic calculations every second.

The network first crossed the one-zettahash level during 2025. Hashrate Index estimates that hashrate peaked at approximately 1,110 EH/s in November 2025 — the highest level ever recorded — before declining through the first half of 2026. Weaker mining economics pushed older, less efficient machines offline, and some mining companies began shifting electricity and data-center capacity toward artificial intelligence workloads.

The Q3 2026 reading was roughly 8.7% lower year over year and about 15% below the November 2025 peak. Short-term data since then points to a partial recovery, with the seven-day estimate moving back toward 983 EH/s in early October 2026.

Source: Hashrate Index, mempool.space

Mining Difficulty

Bitcoin's mining difficulty governs how hard it is to find a valid block. The parameter adjusts automatically every 2,016 blocks — roughly every two weeks — to keep the average interval between blocks close to ten minutes.

Difficulty stood at approximately 132.72 trillion on October 7, 2026, down from around 150.84 trillion a year earlier, a decline of about 12% over the year. The all-time high of approximately 155.97 trillion was set in October 2025.

When miners switch machines off and hashrate falls, difficulty can fall as well, improving the economics for miners that stay online. This built-in self-correcting mechanism is part of's design and helps the network find its balance.

Where Is Bitcoin Mined?

The blockchain does not record the physical location of mining hardware. Researchers estimate mining geography using data from mining pools, equipment shipments, firmware signatures and IP addresses. The figures below come from Hashrate Index's Q4 2026 Global Hashrate Heatmap.

The United States, Russia and China together account for an estimated 65.4% of global Bitcoin hashrate. How that computing power is distributed across jurisdictions is closely tracked because Bitcoin's security depends on no single party controlling a majority of the network's computing power.

The U.S. remains the world's largest mining market by a wide margin, but its estimated hashrate fell from roughly 389 EH/s a year ago to around 335 EH/s — a decline of about 14%. Hashrate Index links part of the drop to mining companies reallocating power capacity toward AI data centers.

Russia moved in the opposite direction. Its estimated share rose to approximately 18.1%, the highest level recorded in Hashrate Index's data series.

China's continued presence is notable. Despite a government crackdown on cryptocurrency mining that began in 2021, Hashrate Index still estimates around 110 EH/s of computing power operating in the country, ranking it third globally.

Paraguay has become the world's fourth-largest estimated mining jurisdiction at approximately 45 EH/s, benefiting from large surpluses of hydroelectric power that provide inexpensive electricity. Indonesia reached approximately 20 EH/s, while Pakistan and Venezuela have emerged as fast-growing locations — part of a broader pattern of mining spreading into countries with low-cost or surplus electricity.

Bitcoin Mining Pools

Mining pools combine computing power from many participants. The pool earns block rewards as a group and splits them proportionally to each participant's contributed work, giving individual miners a steadier income stream than the lottery-like odds of solo mining.

Recent mempool.space data shows block production concentrated among a small number of large pools. Foundry USA, AntPool and F2Pool alone recently accounted for more than 60% of blocks. Over the full period since the April 2024 halving, Foundry USA has produced approximately 29.4% of all blocks, followed by AntPool at 19.8%, ViaBTC at 11.9% and F2Pool at 10.9%.

Pool concentration is not the same as hardware ownership concentration. Mining companies can move machines between pools quickly, so a pool controlling 20% of hashrate does not necessarily own 20% of the mining equipment.

Large publicly traded miners are a growing force in the industry. MARA reported an energized hashrate of 66.4 EH/s at the end of 2025, up from 24.7 EH/s two years earlier. Other publicly traded miners operating industrial-scale facilities include CleanSpark, Riot Platforms, IREN and Bitfarms.

How Much Energy Does Bitcoin Mining Use?

Measuring Bitcoin mining's electricity consumption requires estimates rather than direct readings, since there is no global meter on the network. Researchers rely on assumptions about hashrate, hardware efficiency and the geographic mix of mining operations.

The Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance ran one of the most detailed studies available, surveying 49 mining companies across 23 countries that together represented approximately 48% of global Bitcoin hashrate at the time of the research.

Cambridge estimates that Bitcoin mining consumes 138 terawatt-hours of electricity per year — roughly 0.54% of global electricity consumption, comparable to the annual use of a mid-sized country.

The study also found hardware efficiency improved approximately 24% year over year, reaching around 28.2 joules per terahash as of June 2024. Better hardware does not automatically mean lower total electricity use, however. More efficient machines can motivate miners to deploy additional units, and industry-wide hashrate can grow faster than efficiency improves — meaning total consumption can still rise even as individual machines use less power per terahash.

What Powers Bitcoin Mining?

Cambridge's survey found that more than half of Bitcoin's electricity came from sources it classifies as sustainable. Approximately 52.4% of the power reported by surveyed miners came from renewables and nuclear combined, with renewables alone accounting for 42.6% and nuclear adding another 9.8%.

Natural gas was the single largest energy source at 38.2%. Coal's share dropped sharply, falling from around 36.6% in Cambridge's 2022 survey to just 8.9% in the most recent data.

These figures cover only the miners that participated in the survey, a group that skewed heavily toward North American operations. Mining activity in Russia and China, where coal and natural gas are more common energy sources, is harder to measure and may not be fully represented in these percentages.

Source: Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance

Bitcoin Mining's Carbon Footprint

Cambridge estimated annual greenhouse-gas emissions from Bitcoin mining at approximately 39.8 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent per year, representing roughly 0.08% of global greenhouse-gas emissions.

The figure is sensitive to the assumptions used. Carbon intensity varies widely by country, and factors such as the use of otherwise-flared natural gas can shift the result. Cambridge's estimate is best treated as a useful baseline rather than a precise count of every mining operation worldwide.

How Much Do Miners Earn?

Bitcoin miners earn income from two sources — the block subsidy and transaction fees — with the subsidy by far the larger of the two. Together, that income forms the network's security budget: the total pool of funds available to compensate the operators whose hardware keeps the blockchain running.

The block subsidy currently stands at 3.125 BTC per block following Bitcoin's fourth halving in April 2024. With approximately 144 blocks produced per day, that works out to roughly 450 new BTC issued daily, or approximately 164,000 BTC per year at the current subsidy level, assuming blocks arrive at the target interval.

In dollar terms, miner revenue tracks Bitcoin's price closely. Glassnode data shows daily aggregate miner revenue generally ranged from $30 million to $35 million in recent months, while Blockchain.com data recorded individual 2026 days above $40 million. YCharts placed miner revenue at approximately $44.04 million on September 11, 2026, versus $55.43 million on the same date one year earlier. The year-over-year decline reflects a combination of a lower Bitcoin price and the reduced block subsidy introduced at the April 2024 halving.

Transaction Fees: A Growing Concern

Transaction are the second component of miner income. Users attach fees to transactions, and miners generally prioritize those offering the highest fee rate. When demand for Bitcoin block space rises, fees rise with it. Ordinals, BRC-20 tokens and the Runes protocol each produced short-term spikes in fee revenue during previous periods of high demand, but current conditions are very different.

Mempool.space's recent 144-block data showed:

• Total miner rewards: approximately 452 BTC
• Average transaction fees per block: approximately 0.0142 BTC
• Average subsidy per block: 3.125 BTC

During the period measured, miners collected roughly 2 BTC in total fees across 144 blocks, compared with approximately 450 BTC in new block subsidies. Glassnode estimated fees at around 0.69% of total miner revenue.

The imbalance matters for Bitcoin's future security model. The block subsidy halves roughly every four years: the next halving, expected around 2028, will cut the reward from 3.125 BTC to 1.5625 BTC per block, and each subsequent halving will reduce it further until the subsidy eventually reaches zero.

Bitcoin's security model depends on miners having enough economic incentive to keep processing transactions and securing the blockchain. If the subsidy disappears and fees do not grow large enough to replace it, miner revenue falls — and with it, the economic security of the network. At less than 1% of revenue today, fees have a long way to go.

What Does Mining Cost?

Cambridge found that electricity accounted for more than 80% of miners' cash operating expenses. Surveyed mining companies reported a median electricity-only cost of $45 per MWh and a median all-in power cost of $55.50 per MWh.

Access to cheap electricity is one of the biggest competitive advantages in the mining industry. It explains why mining operations tend to appear near surplus hydropower, stranded natural gas, curtailed renewable energy and other sources of low-cost power.

Financing, hardware depreciation, cooling systems, data center space and staff make up the bulk of remaining costs. Hardware spending in particular is closely tied to the ASIC upgrade cycle: miners must continuously invest in newer, more efficient machines to stay competitive as older hardware becomes unprofitable to run.

Hardware Efficiency

Modern Bitcoin mining depends almost entirely on ASICs — application-specific integrated circuits built solely to compute Bitcoin's proof-of-work algorithm. General-purpose hardware such as GPUs and CPUs can no longer compete profitably for Bitcoin mining.

Cambridge estimated average industry hardware efficiency at approximately 28.2 joules per terahash as of June 2024, a 24% improvement from the previous year. Large miners push beyond the industry average: MARA reported fleet efficiency of approximately 18.6 J/TH at the end of 2025, well below the industry average.

Hardware manufacturing is concentrated in a small number of companies. Cambridge found that the three largest ASIC makers controlled more than 99% of the market, with Bitmain alone accounting for approximately 82% of surveyed hardware. MicroBT and Canaan make up most of the remainder.

Bitcoin Mining vs. AI

One of the biggest shifts in the mining industry over 2025 and 2026 has been competition from artificial intelligence data centers.

Bitcoin mining sites share many features with AI infrastructure: large electrical connections, established data center facilities, fiber connectivity and the capacity to handle very high electrical loads. Several publicly traded Bitcoin miners have begun allocating capital and power capacity toward AI and high-performance computing projects, and Hashrate Index says the trend contributed to declining Bitcoin mining capacity in the United States, Canada and the UAE during 2026.

The change is structural. In the past, miners could restart idle machines relatively quickly when Bitcoin prices rose and mining became more profitable. Power capacity committed to long-term AI infrastructure contracts may not return to Bitcoin mining even when mining conditions improve. Whether this shift proves temporary or permanent will depend on how Bitcoin's price trajectory compares with the economics of AI data center contracts over the years ahead.

What Comes Next?

Bitcoin mining is operating close to the one-zettahash-per-second level, the United States remains the top mining country, and industrial miners now measure capacity in gigawatts rather than megawatts. Yet the economics have changed dramatically.

The block subsidy has fallen from 50 BTC at Bitcoin's launch in 2009 to 3.125 BTC today. It will halve again around 2028 and continue falling roughly every four years. The industry currently relies almost entirely on newly issued Bitcoin to pay its bills, while transaction fees, at less than 1% of revenue, barely register.

For Bitcoin to remain as secure and well-funded in twenty years as it is today, its fee market will need to grow into a much larger share of total miner income. Whether that happens — and at what pace — is the most important number to watch as the block subsidy continues to shrink.

Sources

• Hashrate Index — Global Hashrate Heatmap, Q4 2026
• mempool.space — Bitcoin Mining Dashboard
• Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance — Cambridge Digital Mining Industry Report
• Cambridge Judge Business School — Sustainable Energy Rising in Bitcoin Mining
• Cambridge Digital Mining Industry Report — Full PDF
• Blockchain.com — Bitcoin Mining Charts
• Glassnode — Bitcoin Miner Revenue
• Glassnode — Miner Revenue From Fees
• S&P Global — Can Bitcoin Mining Outlive Block Subsidies?
• MARA — 2025 Annual Report

This article is based on Bitcoin Mining Statistics 2026, originally published by CoinCentral.