Bitcoin is crossing a critical threshold. On Nov. 17, the amount of Bitcoin mined surpassed 19.95 million coins.

That is 95% of the total supply of 21 million. The remaining 1.05 million coins will take another 115 years to mine.

Bitcoin is entering a new phase: the era of the final 5%.

For miners, the most dangerous era has only just begun...

Investors and Miners Face Different Fates

The most dangerous era has only just begun — a line that has become an understood fact among industry insiders.

Bitcoin issuance has never declined evenly. It is more like a brutal halving game.

In 2009, each block carried a reward of 50 coins. After the 2024 halving, that fell to just 3.125 coins. It took 17 years to mine nearly the first 20 million coins, but the final 1 million will take a full century.

The revenue model miners depend on is breaking down. In the past, block rewards alone could support a comfortable business.

Now those rewards keep shrinking, leaving miners to pin their hopes on transaction fees. On the day of the April 2024 halving, fees in some blocks did exceed the block reward itself.

But that situation quickly disappeared. Even more difficult is the enormous pressure on current cash flow.

Cash Flow Crisis

The core metric for measuring miner earnings is hashprice. Last week, it fell to $38.82 per PH of computing power per day, a one-year low.

Compared with the $80 to $100 levels seen during the bull market, it has effectively been cut in half.

Making matters worse, a new rival has emerged on the energy front: AI companies are bidding up prices to secure power contracts.

Miners are caught in the middle. AI is competing for energy from above, while halved output is squeezing revenue from below. A transition now looks like the only way out.

One option is to keep grinding away at crypto mining, pushing electricity costs as low as possible while upgrading to the most advanced ASIC chips.

Another is to become a kind of sublandlord, leasing their mining farms to AI companies.

Or they can make a full pivot into computing power services. MARA’s CEO put it plainly: by 2028, you either generate your own power, or you wait to be acquired.

The Scarcity Paradox

Not everyone will make it ashore. Small mining farms that rely heavily on the public grid have already entered a survival countdown under the twin pressures of electricity prices and mining difficulty.

More ironic is the contradiction around scarcity. We all know that 3 million to 4 million Bitcoin have been permanently lost, leaving only about 17 million coins truly circulating in the market.

That scarcity is becoming more obvious, yet miners’ lives are getting harder.

Crypto mining has quietly shifted from the production of digital currency into a contest over energy. The foundation of Bitcoin’s value is also undergoing a subtle change.

From another angle, the scarcity investors prize is, at its core, confidence built by miners through real energy consumption.

But when transaction fees are no longer enough to cover computing power costs, and when mining farms become appendages of the AI industry, can this mining game, which is set to last nearly 100 more years, still continue?