GoMining and the 2028 halving: what happens to your miner the day after

Every 210,000 blocks, the reward the Bitcoin network pays per block is cut in half. It isn't anybody's decision: it has been in the code since 2009 and happens roughly every four years. The next one lands in 2028 and affects anyone with hashrate running — GoMining included.

The interesting part isn't the event itself, which is well known. It's the asymmetry: the halving cuts your revenue in two and doesn't touch a cent of your costs.

Exactly how long is left

This isn't a calendar guess: it comes from the network's real block height, read right now.

The date assumes 144 blocks per day, which is the protocol's design rate. In practice blocks come slightly faster or slower as hashrate enters or leaves the network, so the real date can move by a few weeks either way. The halving height, on the other hand, is exact: it depends on nothing.

Your maintenance bill doesn't notice

This is the whole story. When the halving arrives:

• Your revenue falls by roughly half. Not exactly half: each block also pays the transaction fees, which are not cut. But the subsidy is the big part, so the drop lands close to 50%.
• Your costs stay exactly where they were. The electricity your miner burns doesn't change. The $0.0089 per TH per day service fee doesn't either. Your bill the day after is identical to the day before.

A miner running on thin margin today goes into the red on halving day. One running comfortably drops to thin. Here's what happens to each efficiency tier with current network data and today's bitcoin price:

100 TH miner, electricity at $0.05/kWh, no maintenance discounts and holding both the bitcoin price and network difficulty constant. This is not a 2028 forecast: it answers "what if the halving were tomorrow and everything else stayed the same". It isolates the halving's effect — it does not predict the future.

The bitcoin price that would offset it

If revenue is cut in half, the price has to rise to get back to the starting point. Exactly how much depends on your efficiency, because each tier starts from a different margin:

Bitcoin price at which net returns to zero after the halving, with no maintenance discounts and today's difficulty. It's the threshold to stop losing, not to earn what you earn now. With discounts maxed out (up to 29% across the three documented ones) every threshold drops.

What this calculation doesn't know: difficulty

This needs saying plainly, because almost no article about halvings says it: the scenario above is the worst case, and it's probably not what will happen.

The reason is that network difficulty isn't a constant. When the reward is cut in two, miners on the thinnest margins — those running inefficient hardware or expensive electricity — stop being profitable and switch off. As hashrate leaves the network, difficulty falls, and those who remain take a larger slice of a smaller pie. Historically that has absorbed part of the blow.

But that absorption isn't a rescue: it's a redistribution. The ones who benefit are the miners who survive, which is to say the efficient ones. The inefficient ones are precisely the ones switching off. If the conclusion of the efficiency article was that W/TH decide the price at which you stop earning, the halving is the moment that sentence comes due: it's the day the ruin threshold of every tier jumps at once, and the selection runs from the bottom up.

In the other direction, you can't assume difficulty will fall either. It has climbed steadily from 2024 to today, and if it keeps climbing through 2028 the blow will be larger than the table shows, not smaller. That's why the calculator's 24-month projection applies both: the halving at its due height and a monthly difficulty growth rate you can adjust yourself.

What you can do with two years of notice

There's no trick, but there are three things that are in your hands and open today:

• Efficiency is bought before, not after. A 12 W/TH miner and a 28 W/TH miner earn the same and survive very different scenarios. After the halving, upgrading costs the same but with less margin to pay for it.
• Maintenance discounts lower every threshold. They're worth up to 29% across the three documented ones, and they act on exactly the part the halving doesn't touch: cost. How each one is earned is in the token and VIP tiers article.
• Your time horizon matters. If your payback period runs past 2028, the halving isn't a distant risk — it's inside your own recovery calculation. Worth looking at break-even both with and without it.

In short

• The halving is the one predictable thing in mining. It happens at an exact block height, not on a date; the date is an estimate from the blocks remaining.
• It cuts your revenue and leaves your costs alone. That asymmetry is the entire problem.
• The drop isn't exactly 50%: transaction fees aren't halved, though today they're the small part of the block.
• The table's scenario is the worst case, because it assumes difficulty doesn't move. In practice some inefficient miners switch off and that cushions the blow — for those who survive.
• Efficiency decides who survives. The halving doesn't reorder the W/TH tiers: it raises the bar for all of them at once.
• If your payback runs past 2028, the halving is already inside your numbers, whether you put it there or not.

Put your numbers into the calculator and look at the 24-month projection: the halving is applied automatically and marked on the curve. To see where each formula comes from, read the methodology.