Hash Power Doesn’t Determine Bitcoin’s Price
Key Takeaways
- Brian Armstrong said July 20 that hash power leaving Bitcoin doesn’t set its price, citing the currency’s difficulty adjustment as his core argument.
- Bitcoin’s difficulty fell 5% to 127.17 trillion on July 11 after hashrate dropped 7.9% to 908 EH/s in ten days.
- Armstrong called $60,000 the bottom in June; 56.3% of roughly 27,000 poll respondents disagreed on July 14.
The Argument
Armstrong made the case in a post on X, wading into a debate that flared the same day after billionaire investor Chamath Palihapitiya argued that bitcoin bulls face two problems, i.e speculative liquidity drifting to prediction and equity markets, and mining energy being worth more if redirected to AI.
“Interesting point. The first one feels temporary. The second one more durable,” Armstrong began, before rejecting the conclusion, writing:
“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 exchange arrives at a sensitive moment for the mining industry, given that analysts have described miners as abandoning the network for AI and high-performance computing contracts, repurposing power and cooling infrastructure originally built for mining rigs.
How the Difficulty Reset Works
Armstrong’s technical point rests on one of the Bitcoin network’s oldest mechanisms, where roughly every two weeks, the protocol retunes how hard it is to find a new block, so that blocks keep arriving about every ten minutes regardless of how many machines are competing. When miners unplug, the puzzle gets easier; when they pile in, it gets harder.
That mechanism just fired in the miners’ favor, with Bitcoin.com News reporting recently that the network’s difficulty fell 5% to 127.17 trillion on July 11, its 14th adjustment of 2026 (after the hashrate dropped 7.9% in ten days to 908 EH/s). The reset lifted hashprice, a measure of miner revenue per unit of computing power, by 12.5% to $31.1 per PH/s, though it remains 37.2% below its October 2025 peak.
In other words, the system absorbed the exodus exactly as designed, i.e. fewer machines, easier math, steadier economics for the miners who stayed. What the adjustment cannot do, Armstrong’s critics might note, is manufacture demand, which is why he argues price is determined elsewhere.
The Bottom-Calling Continues
In June, Armstrong declared $60,000 the bottom for bitcoin, and he has repeatedly described himself as “as bullish as ever on Bitcoin, and still long — as always,” urging investors to judge the asset over full cycles rather than individual crashes.
His own audience is not fully convinced because when Armstrong asked followers on July 14 whether the bottom was in, 56.3% of roughly 27,000 respondents said no. In any case, the next difficulty adjustment, due within days, will offer a fresh reading on whether the miner exodus is stabilizing and whether Armstrong’s $60,000 line survives the test.