Despite the Harshest Profit Squeeze in Half a Decade, Bitcoin Mining on U.S. Soil is Consolidating and Gathering Momentum

Washington has recognized bitcoin's proof-of-work as a strategic resource, state legislatures are offering regulatory clarity

Workers check crypto mining racks at an industrial mining facility. (Photo by DANIEL DUARTE/AFP via ... MoreGetty Images)Despite the harshest profit squeeze in half a decade, the business of mining bitcoin on U.S. soil is consolidating and once again gathering momentum. Washington has recognized bitcoin’s proof-of-work as a strategic resource, state legislatures are offering regulatory clarity, manufacturers are shipping more efficient machines, and entrepreneurs are inventing new revenue models that couple mining with digital collectibles and flexible-load grid services.

These converging forces help explain why network hashrate continues to march toward the one-zettahash era even as hashprice languishes and publicly traded miners dump inventory. As mining difficulty rises even as bitcoin’s price trades sideways, it is possible to observe an industry scaling into a deeper economic cycle.

The clearest inflection came on 6 March 2025, when President Trump signed an executive order creating a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, directing Treasury to hold forfeited coins and authorizing research into budget-neutral accumulation methods. The Order states that “there is a strategic advantage to being among the first nations to create a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve” due to Bitcoin’s fixed supply, and it refers to Bitcoin as “digital gold” because of its scarcity and security.

At the state level, Arkansas had already laid groundwork with the Data Centers Act of 2023, which classifies mining as protected industrial activity and curtails local zoning interference. Oklahoma followed with a Commercial Digital Asset Mining Act in 2024 granting sales-tax relief on rigs and power contracts, while Texas’ updated HB 1666 balanced custody standards with grid-integration incentives, evidence that states view miners as high-load customers, not environmental transgressors.

Federal industrial policy reinforces the point. This past summer, Block’s Proto team signed an agreement to supply Core Scientific with 3 nm modular rigs and publish design files so other operators can manufacture locally. By collapsing supply-chain risk and eliminating import tariffs on Chinese hardware that might soon surpass 100 %, the deal incorporates U.S. fabrication with the mining cost stack. Such a move would have seemed far fetched by industry veterans just a few years ago.

Environmental objections, long expressed by policymakers as a key reason to reject bitcoin, have been all but abandoned. And with good reason. A recent Duke University review concluded that flexible bitcoin mining loads could absorb up to 76 GW of new demand with minimal curtailment, reducing the need for peaker plants and accelerating renewable integration. The Bitcoin Policy Institute’s survey of ten North American miners found real-time curtailment rates between five and thirty-one percent, demonstrating that miners routinely shed load during price spikes. These studies rebut the claim that mining “steals” renewable energy and underpin state-level enthusiasm for dispatchable industrial customers.

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Network horsepower averaged 910 EH/s in mid-April, up forty-four percent year-on-year, even though bitcoin traded sideways over the same period. By some measures, the average all-in U.S. production expense sits at about $92,000 per coin, only seven percent above the market quote. This is a narrow margin but bearable for firms that are not overleveraged. The continued rise in hashrate in the face of sideways bitcoin price movement and relatively high interest rates indicates that miners are willing to part with long-term capital (including portions of their bitcoin treasuries) to continue operating, betting they will be able to benefit from a rapid increase in bitcoin’s price.

Innovation is not confined to semiconductors. At least one project seeks to tie ordinal inscriptions to real megawatts and share monthly mining revenue with token holders. This would capitalize on the popularity of speculative digital collectibles to support the expansion of mining infrastructure. Blockware, which is leading the project, says the model channels proceeds into its 500 MW infrastructure pipeline, demonstrating how non-traditional capital can finance expansion without diluting shareholders.

Tether announced in April that it would direct both existing and future hashrate to Luke Dashjr’s Ocean pool, whose open-source DATUM protocol lets individual miners construct their own block templates rather than outsource that task to a small cartel of pools. The move addresses a subtle but critical security vector: when three pools assemble nearly two-thirds of all blocks, censorship risk migrates from edge to hub. Ocean’s model restores that function to the periphery, hardening the network against regulatory capture.

Solo mining remains statistically improbable, yet its cultural effect is outsized. On March 10, 2025, a solo miner using a Bitaxe 204 Ultra – a compact, open-source ASIC miner priced around $150 – mined