The Economics of Mining
Understand mining profitability, public miners and their treasuries, the AI/HPC pivot, and the financial realities of running a modern mining operation.
12 min · intermediate · part of Crypto Mining & Validation
What you'll learn
- The Cost Structure of Mining
- Calculating Mining Profitability
- Public Miners: The Industrial Landscape
- Should You Mine? An Honest Assessment
- For Deeper Reading
Key terms
- Hashprice
- The expected daily revenue per unit of hashrate (e.g., dollars per TH/s per day). The fundamental metric of miner profitability.
- Mining margin
- Revenue per BTC mined minus all-in cost per BTC mined. Public miners report this in quarterly filings.
- Marathon Digital (MARA)
- The largest publicly-traded Bitcoin miner by treasury holdings: ~38,689 BTC as of March 2026, after selling 15,133 BTC for ~$1.1B during 2025-early 2026.
- Riot Platforms (RIOT)
- A major Texas-based public miner with ~15,679 BTC in Q1 2026 and ~$167M Q1 revenue; operates the Rockdale and Corsicana facilities.
- CleanSpark (CLSK)
- A pure-play public Bitcoin miner with ~13,561 BTC and ~50.0 EH/s of operational hashrate as of March 2026.
- Galaxy Digital
- A diversified digital-asset financial-services firm with a substantial mining operation; ~6,894 BTC (~$510M) as of April 2026.
- Cipher Digital
- Public miner formerly known as Cipher Mining, renamed on February 20, 2026 to reflect a strategic pivot toward HPC/AI hosting alongside Bitcoin mining.
- Core Scientific
- A major miner that filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy in November 2022, emerged on January 25, 2024, and rejected a $9B CoreWeave acquisition on October 30, 2025.
- AI/HPC pivot
- The 2024-2026 industry trend in which Bitcoin miners convert or co-locate capacity for AI training and inference, leveraging their power and cooling infrastructure for higher-margin AI compute revenue.
- Industrial mining
- Mining at gigawatt scale, with industrial power contracts, professional facility management, and treasury operations — the dominant form of Bitcoin mining in 2026.
- Payback period
- The time required for a mining operation to recover its initial hardware capital expense from net mining profit. A primary capital-allocation metric.
- Stranded energy mining
- Mining that uses electricity that would otherwise be wasted — flared gas, surplus hydropower in remote regions, off-peak grid capacity. Has become a major theme in U.S. mining since 2021.
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Open lessonEducational only — not financial advice.