JP Morgan Identifies $85,000 as Key Price for Bitcoin

• $85,000 acts as a "soft floor" marking the point where miners cover their costs.
• The loss of energy capacity due to the advancement of AI moderates the growth of the hashrate.

A team of analysts from JPMorgan, led by Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou, estimated the average cost of producing 1 bitcoin (BTC) at around $85,000. Therefore, the bank considers this figure as the profitability threshold for the mining industry.

According to the report, bitcoin remained below this level for 280 days before surpassing it during last week's rally when its price went above $87,000. The last time it spent a comparable period below the production cost was in 2018, when it was around 224 days.

Following the publication of the report, the price retreated to $84,100, and on September 30, it is trading at $83,900, again below the estimated line. Bitcoin price in the last month. Source: CoinMarketCap.

The bank's analysts describe this cost as a "soft floor" for the price. It is an economic level and not a technical support on the chart: when bitcoin stays below it for a long time, miners with higher electricity and equipment costs stop being profitable and may sell more bitcoin, shut down machines, or abandon the activity.

Therefore, if the price holds above it, the risk of forced sales decreases. "As long as it holds, this new context should give some relief to Bitcoin miners, reducing the risk of forced sales on their part," the analysts wrote.

During this period of low profitability, according to the bank, Bitcoin miners resisted by relocating equipment to regions with cheaper electricity, selling old machines, keeping others in reserve, and discarding or recycling the less efficient ones. The hashrate has fallen by nearly 19% from its October peak, and mining difficulty has decreased by about 15%.

JPMorgan adds that the industry is also undergoing a shift towards artificial intelligence (AI). AI companies pay premiums for electricity and data centers, with more stable and higher revenues per megawatt than mining, and many publicly traded miners have reduced their growth forecasts for the hashrate due to long-term contracts.

According to the analysts, this flattens the hashrate curve, meaning that production costs would rise more slowly outside of halving events, and it also reduces the market share of publicly traded miners compared to private and sovereign ones.

As reported by CriptoNoticias, miners are experiencing the worst profitability crisis in years, and the hashrate has not set a new record for almost eleven months. In this context, economist Saifedean Ammous suggested that the contraction could be structural, given that the economic conditions for miners have changed.

His hypothesis is that capital expenditure and electricity consumption in the sector likely peaked between 2024 and 2025. As support, he cites estimates from Cambridge indicating that the electricity consumption of the network dropped from about 190 terawatt-hours (TWh) in December 2025 to around 130 TWh by mid-2026, in parallel with the advancement of AI as a competitor for cheap energy.

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