Miners lost $4 to 5 billion during the 2022 Bitcoin bear market and almost half went bankrupt from November 2022 to April 2023.
![](https://broward.ghost.io/content/images/2024/07/bitcoin_miners_2022_loss-1.jpg)
Loss of miners means loss of network bandwidth, which means longer processing time and lower traffic capacity. Bitcoin still hasn't fully recovered and is always running in a saturated state, i.e. over–capacity. A permanent mempool (traffic overflow) of 200K translates into a 1-2% loss rate, roughly the same as email.
![](https://broward.ghost.io/content/images/2024/07/miners-1.jpg)
![](https://broward.ghost.io/content/images/2024/07/tr.jpg)
You can also see the damage in Bitcoin's response time, which hasn't recovered to the pre–crash response time.
![](https://broward.ghost.io/content/images/2024/07/confirmation_time-2.jpg)
Bitcoin is currently at $54,700.
Miner income: $54.7K x 165K coins per year = $9 billion
Miner energy cost: 140 terawatts at $0.10 / kwatt = $14 billion
Miners are in the same position again, losing $5 billion per year. Bitcoin would likely have died by early 2024 except for Blackrock spending several billion to prop up bankrupt miners.
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