Armstrong: Miners’ hash power not the driver of Bitcoin price
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong wrote that miners unplugging hash power does not determine Bitcoin’s price, citing the protocol’s difficulty adjustment that keeps blocks on schedule.
On July 20, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong posted on X that miners unplugging hash power does not determine Bitcoin’s price, pointing to the network’s built-in difficulty adjustment that preserves block timing when computing power falls.
Armstrong responded to investor Chamath Palihapitiya, who warned that bitcoin faces two pressures: speculative liquidity moving to other markets and mining energy being redirected to artificial intelligence and high-performance computing. Armstrong said the first pressure looked temporary and the second more durable, and added: “But hash power or energy going to Bitcoin mining doesn’t determine its price (the network difficulty adjusts if miners go offline to keep the same pace of block mining).”
The difficulty adjustment is a rule in the Bitcoin protocol that recalibrates roughly every two weeks to target one new block about every ten minutes. When miners stop mining, the network lowers the mathematical difficulty so remaining machines can find blocks at a similar pace; when more machines join, the puzzle becomes harder.
Network metrics show the mechanism operating. Over a ten-day span, estimated hashrate fell about 7.9% to roughly 908 exahashes per second. On July 11 the protocol’s difficulty dropped about 5% to 127.17 trillion. That adjustment raised hashprice, a measure of miner revenue per unit of computing power, by roughly 12.5% to $31.10 per petahash per second. That hashprice remains about 37% below its October 2025 peak.
Armstrong has also commented on bitcoin’s price in recent months. In June he called $60,000 the market bottom and described himself as bullish and long. When he polled followers on July 14 about whether the bottom was in, about 56.3% of roughly 27,000 respondents said it was not.
The next scheduled difficulty adjustment, due within days, will provide another data point on whether hashrate pressure from AI and other computing contracts is stabilizing and how miners’ economics are changing. The adjustment affects the pace of block production and miner revenue but does not itself create demand for bitcoin.
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