Bitcoin (BTC) Mining Difficulty Stays Below 155.97T Peak for Record 374 Days

A Record 374 Days Without a New Peak

Bitcoin (BTC) mining difficulty has now spent 374 consecutive days below its all-time high, the longest such drought in the network's history. The record of 155.97 trillion (T) was set on October 29, 2025, and every adjustment since has landed short of it. One T denotes one trillion hash computations, and the figure is quoted in trillions across mining dashboards. The on-chain difficulty history at Mempool.space places the peak at block 921,312 and shows no later print above that level; counted from that date, the gap reached 374 days on November 7, 2026. The drought already exceeds the previous mark of 364 days, set between an August 1, 2011 peak and the July 30, 2012 recovery high, and it runs well past the 253 days difficulty needed to recover from China's 2021 mining ban, which peaked on May 13, 2021 and printed its next high on January 21, 2022. That 2021 episode took a large share of global machines offline at once; the current drought has run longer without a single comparable shock. A 374-day gap does not mean the target fell for a year. Difficulty, the network gauge that sets how much proof of work each block demands, is recalculated every 2,016 blocks, roughly every two weeks, to hold average block intervals near ten minutes. Each figure then holds fixed until the epoch ends. It dropped 10.09% to a trough of 124.93T on June 14, 2026, about 20% under the record, then rose 5.92% to 140.58T on October 16 and another 5.54% to 148.36T on October 29, still 4.88% short of the top. The two October rallies closed much of the distance, yet neither reached the October 2025 watermark. The ceiling reflects economics as much as engineering: the Bitcoin price has traded just under $76,000, well below the levels that made the 2025 build-out pay for itself.

Miner Treasuries Turn Net Sellers

Economist Saifedean Ammous, the author of The Bitcoin (BTC) Standard and a leading voice in Bitcoin maximalism, flagged the milestone in a Saturday post on X. He argued the stretch is more severe than either the 2011 crash, when the price fell 95%, or the Chinese ban, and closed: “Bitcoin mining has entered a whole new world.” The corporate ledger backs the judgment. Public miners had spent years presenting their treasury stacks as a strategic Bitcoin reserve; that pitch is now unwinding. Riot Platforms has sold $750 million worth of Bitcoin, Hut 8 has sold $250 million, and Keel Infrastructure has emptied its entire $192 million reserve. Terawulf and IREN are redirecting capacity toward artificial-intelligence workloads as mining revenue thins, and both have committed fresh capital to AI hosting rather than to new hashing hardware, a pivot now reshaping the listed Bitcoin mining sector. Politics has entered the picture too: after their midterm sweep, Democrats are pressing policies that would restrict data-center footprints, and miners compete with those facilities for the same grid connections. Sub-peak difficulty is not, by itself, proof of a weakening chain. Hashrate, the estimated volume of computing power pointed at the network, is read on a different clock: seven-day average estimates crossed 1,000 EH/s, one zettahash per second, on October 11, 2026, and held above that line afterward, ending nearly eight months spent below it. That reading is an estimate, not a direct measurement, and it is smoothed over a week. Blocks have continued to arrive on schedule throughout the drought. The distinction matters for reading the record. Difficulty measures what the last 2,016 blocks demanded; hashrate estimates what miners are deploying now; the two rarely move together in real time. What the selloffs show is that the marginal dollar is leaving hash production, not that the chain itself is shrinking.

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The Next Adjustment Points Down

COINOTAG's reading is that this is a capital-allocation story, not a security story. With hashrate above 1 ZH/s and blocks arriving on time, the chain's work budget is intact; what has stopped growing is the marginal miner willing to buy machines and power at prices under $76,000. The near-term math points the other way: the current epoch ends in about six days, and the live difficulty tracker estimates a 3.7% cut around November 13, which would push any new all-time high further out. A durable price rebound is the one force that could send difficulty back toward 155.97T; absent that, the drought extends.