PlanB: Bitcoin price has fallen below mining cost, future market trends depend on whether difficulty can rebound.

BlockBeats news, September 17 — Renowned analyst PlanB published a chart comparing network-wide mining difficulty and price, stating that the market should wait for Bitcoin mining difficulty to resume its upward trend. The chart shows that as of September 16, network-wide mining difficulty stood at approximately 127T, with Bitcoin's price clearly trading below the production cost band. From 2024 to 2025, the two broadly rose in tandem; in 2026, difficulty turned sideways and briefly declined, while price led to the downside.

PlanB believes that at this stage, difficulty better characterizes market price than models such as S2F and power law, because it approximates miners' hashrate and BTC production cost. PlanB also emphasized that this is not an immediate buy signal, but rather an observation of the miner capacity cycle. If mining difficulty is revised upward again, it may indicate miners are ramping up once more and a bottom is becoming more confirmed; if difficulty continues to be revised downward, the market remains in a deleveraging phase.